In this installment of Jerry’s Story, we’ll cover his experience as an undergraduate student. Refer to the home page for Jerry’s Story to navigate to other installments.

Earlier, we learned how Jerry ended up starting college at the University of Nebraska (in “An aspiring auto mechanic changes course“). This was in the Fall of 1950. Because he had skipped two grades in elementary school, Jerry was only 16 years old; it was still a few months before his 17th birthday. Despite the age difference with the vast majority of his peers, he seemed to fit in better in college than he had in high school. He no longer felt the need to hide his intelligence to avoid bullying, and he made friends with other smart people. He didn’t have any financial help from his parents, so he didn’t consider any other schools that were more expensive.

Jerry told his counselors that he wanted to work with computers. There were no classes in computing and there were no computers on the campus at all. The only thing the counselors knew about computers was that they had something to do with electrical engineering and physics. Because he was good in mathematics, they recommended that he major in physics, thinking that his math talents wouldn’t be put to good use as an electrical engineer.

He took an exam that allowed him to skip the freshman English composition class and go straight to advanced English composition. He found out that the advanced class covered everything from the regular English composition class in just six weeks and then continued on to more advanced topics for the rest of the semester. He wasn’t excited enough about studying English to be interested in an intense class like that, so he signed up for the basic English composition class. At the beginning of his book Weinberg on Writing, Jerry told the story of how he met the professor, Wilbur G. Gaffney–generally known to his students as Bill–

On the first day, we assembled on the second floor of Andrews Hall, only to discover that our section was actually two sections, with two different instructors. We stood in the hall while the instructors counted us off, one-two, one-two, to divide the class. I was a one.

The instructors were both men, but there the resemblance ended. One was skinny, immaculate, clean-shaven with hard eyes and bony cheeks. And no smile. The other was rotund, clothed in wrinkles, with a white walrus mustache covering plump, rosy cheeks. He smiled as if he’d just taken a nip before class. I had no doubt as to which one was for me, but unfortunately, Bill Gaffney, the Walrus, was taking the twos. So, of course, I had to cheat.

I just moved with the twos. It was one of that handful of truly life-changing moments.

Jerry dutifully completed his first writing assignment for the class, which earned a C-plus and a lot of red marks on his paper. For his second assignment, he couldn’t stand writing about a topic he wasn’t interested in. So instead, he wrote a paper explaining why he wasn’t going to do the assignment or any other assignment like it. He wasn’t surprised at the professor’s response, at least at first–

On Wednesday, the graded papers were handed back, but I didn’t get one. Instead, Gaffney handed me a note in red ink saying to come to his office after class. I was right. My brief college career was over.

His corner office was a mess, more rumpled than his tweed jacket, more tangled than his walrus mustache. Books piled everywhere. Reprints on every horizontal surface except the ceiling. Pipe smoke odor permeating everything. He motioned me to clear a space on one of the two wooden chairs, then shut the door on the passing student throng. He returned to his desk and picked up what I recognized as my message. It had red marks all over.

I took a deep breath, probably my last as a matriculated student. Before handing me the paper, Bill Gaffney packed his pipe, lit it with a Zippo, and blew out a huge cloud of pungent smoke. I didn’t want to say this in front of the class … He puffed out another Vesuvian billow. … but in all the years I’ve been teaching freshman English composition … Another gargantuan puff. … this is the best paper I’ve ever received.

He handed me the paper. I forgot to close my hand, and the pages fluttered to the floor. He continued speaking to my bent back. Your argument has totally convinced me, so from now on, you’ll just ignore the assignments I give to the rest of the class. You’ll still have to turn in a paper every week, but you’ll choose whatever topic, whatever style, and whatever length you wish.

Bill Gaffney had years of experience as a professional editor in New York, which made him a more effective writing teacher. Jerry took several classes from Gaffney, learning a lot about the mechanics of English and how to revise his writing so it “sang on the page.” Jerry even worked for Gaffney, helping to grade essays. Jerry read hundreds of essays from freshman composition classes, never receiving any coaching from the professor on how to grade them. Jerry actually had worked for a different professor before then, but he quit when he saw that professor adjusting grades upward for his favorite students and downward for the rest.

When reading all those essays, Jerry observed rudimentary spelling and grammar mistakes, and also mistakes of thinking and reasoning. This went a long way toward shaping his writing skills, and he was happy to get paid to do it. Gaffney became of one of Jerry’s lifelong friends.

When he started at the university, Jerry joined a social fraternity and moved into the fraternity house. He thought that’s what everyone did. The fraternity had a contest where the members bet on what the freshmen’s grade point average would be at the end of the first semester. Jerry was still good at concealing his intelligence, so much so that he was given the longest odds of having the best grades. One fraternity brother bet on Jerry and later won a lot of money when Jerry came out on top of the grades list. The two became friends and bridge partners.

Jerry and his partner won the school’s bridge tournament two years in a row, and also went on to be NCAA regional champions one year. Jerry got a productive friendship from his experience at the fraternity, but once he learned more about how the fraternity conducted itself, he realized that it wasn’t a fit for him, so he left the fraternity.

The University of Nebraska was a land-grant college, which at the time, meant that students were required to join the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC). Jerry joined the Army ROTC program. His habit of skipping class and not bothering to wear the required uniform earned him demerits at a rapid rate. When he reached 300 demerits, he was required to report to the commander, a Colonel, which could have resulted in him failing the program. Jerry described what happened:

When I went in to his office, he was playing bridge with three of his underlings. I watched until the commander’s partner, a captain, played a hand but did not make the contract. Captain said Colonel had overbid. I said, no, the contract should have been made if played properly. After a few more hands, Captain had to leave and Colonel invited me to be his partner. We beat the pants off the two majors, and it turned out they were playing for money. Colonel asked why I had come to see him. I told him about the demerits and he waved them away, on condition that I come twice a week to be his bridge partner.

Jerry didn’t just get his demerits erased. He no longer had to march in parades; he checked out the rifles for the parades instead. The commander even bought him socks to match his uniform.

Jerry quickly became a good marksman. He could take the rifles apart and reassemble them blindfolded. He became a rifle instructor while he was still a freshman. Years later, his shooting skills helped out when we was living in Switzerland. He visited a few local fairs and showed his skills at target shooting. He thinks the locals really valued marksmanship, and this helped his family fit in to their new community.

The only thing Jerry ever killed with a gun was a rabbit he once spotted in his garden. It’s wasn’t a pleasant memory–

I saw it die, and I felt terrible. I did give the corpse to a friend who made a rabbit stew, which made me feel temporarily better about the shooting, but it was really unnecessary. I guess I thought I could make a near miss and scare the poor thing away, but I was too good a shot.

Early in his second year at the University of Nebraska, Jerry started having health problems that were so severe that he moved back home to Omaha. After three major surgeries, he was finally diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. His weight had dropped to 110 pounds. He become addicted to morphine during this ordeal, but was forced to quit during one of his hospital stays.

He must have had some good days while back in Omaha. There was an event Jerry wanted to attend, perhaps a dance at the University of Omaha. For his date, he had his eye on a girl named Joan. But Joan was hard to reach on the phone. Unable to talk to Joan, he thought of her close friend Pattie. He knew Pattie because she sometimes helped at her father’s paint store. When Jerry had helped at his father’s auto body shop back in high school, he would occasionally see Pattie when he picked up paint supplies. She was a high school senior at this point and still living in Omaha. She accepted the invitation, and they had their first date.

After spending almost a year in Omaha, Jerry had recovered from the worst of his symptoms, though he would suffer from the effects of Crohn’s disease for the rest of his life. He returned to Lincoln to continue his studies at the University of Nebraska. Pattie also enrolled there, where she moved in to a sorority house. As a result of his ongoing health problems, Jerry was given a 4F classification by the Army, which meant he was released from his obligation to participate in ROTC.

What started as a date of convenience in Omaha turned into something more over the next year. By the time Jerry went to work a summer job at 3M in Saint Paul, Minnesota, he couldn’t stand to be away from Pattie. He said, “I don’t recall that there was a proposal. We both knew we were going to marry. It certainly was planned, with all the ridiculous fuss that implies.” In August 1953, when Jerry was 19 years old and she was 18, Jerry married Patricia Anne Korney in Omaha.

Jerry felt strongly that the doctors in Omaha had saved his life. He wanted to be a “heroic doctor” to give back to society, so he decided to become a pre-med student. He was already planning to take all of the science courses required by the pre-med program, so it didn’t actually require any change of coursework. But he was willing to give up on a chance to work with computers to take this path.

Then, on a lovely Spring day, another student stopped me outside between classes and asked if I was going to the initiation ‘tonight.’

‘What initiation?’ I asked.

‘The pre-med honorary society.’

‘Why would I go there?’

‘Your name was on the list.’

‘I didn’t see any list.’ It had been posted, but I hadn’t seen it or thought it had anything to do with me.

He explained how being in this society (I forget the name) increased your chances of being admitted to a good medical school, so I asked for details. He gave me time and place, then said all it cost was a 50 cent initiation fee.

‘Oh,’ I said, my mind clearing. Suddenly I knew that my desire to become a doctor wasn’t worth fifty cents. That was the end of my medical career.

Thinking that he couldn’t get into medical school without joining this society, and thinking that he’d rather being able to afford an order of French fries than pay to go to the meeting, Jerry abruptly dropped his plans to go to medical school. Later, after several more experiences with doctors and also comparing notes with others, he concluded that in fact the doctors had almost killed him with their treatment.

One of the many subjects Jerry explored at the University of Nebraska was psychology. But he dropped his psychology class after only going to a few lectures. Why? “A really stupid lecture in a huge classroom. The lecture seemed full of obvious or ridiculous stuff. I think I’d hoped it would teach something about intelligence, but clearly that wasn’t going to happen.” He would come back to psychology many times later in his life, however, referencing it in his writing and even learning how to be a therapist.

He appreciated being introduced to anthropology and was disappointed that the university didn’t offer an undergraduate major in the subject. This is another subject he would stay close to throughout his life.

Jerry enjoyed his physics classes, especially when he got to work in a lab. He worked as a teaching assistant for a freshman physics lab at age 17, and was told he was the first undergraduate ever to get a TA job in that department. He remembered a physics project that involved building a crude copy machine. It consisted of an inflated plastic hood and a camera, and you’d develop and print the picture to get the copy.

For many of his classes, if there was a textbook, he would read it in a day or two, and then he had learned all he would learn from that class. This didn’t always lead to good grades, though. In his differential equations class, the students would learn a progressively more sophisticated method of solving the equations each week. Jerry read ahead and learned better ways to solve the problems the class was currently working on. But his work was counted wrong if he didn’t use the technique he was supposed to be using that week. He didn’t understand the need to use inferior techniques if he could skip ahead and use better methods.

A letter to the editor of the university’s student newspaper at tells us how Pattie and Jerry felt about the quality of the journalism the newspaper was producing. This is possibly the first example of Jerry’s writing that was ever published:

Letterip column

The Daily Nebraskan, March 2, 1954, page 2

Dear Editor:

We are of the rapidly growing group of students who believe that the function of The Nebraskan is to protect the hair of coeds on rainy days. Since most coeds own scarves which do almost as good a job, we question the advisability of continuing to dissapate (sic) University funds on paper hats.

If, however, the function of the paper is to busy the idle hands of journalism students, those students alone should pay the expense or see that the paper pays for itself. As for the argument that The Nebraskan serves as a carrier of the torch of truth to the student body, we question whether a candle wouldn’t shed more light with less smoke. Furthermore, we question whether the students are really in the dark; whether they really want the Rag at all.

We challenge the editors of this paper to publish this letter (without editing); and with it, a request for letters of confidence from members of the student body (other than staff members and workers) which would have to be signed and delivered in person to the Rag office. In this way, we would test how many students really want The Nebraskan badly enough to make this slight effort to back up the staff and its policies. No petitions, please; and no surveys—just personal letters delivered in person.

Even twisted journalism can be interesting and well written; but how about you? Or is bad journalism better than no journalism?

Pat and Jerry Weinberg

The editors probably delighted in meeting the challenge of not editing the letter except for adding “(sic)” after the misspelling. In fact the letter did motivate another reader to send a vote of confidence that was published three days later. And a month later, another reader wrote in expressing confusion over the meaning of the “(sic)” annotation, and adding a nonsensical request that seemed to parrot Pattie and Jerry’s letter: “Do not edit this letter. If you can’t print all of it, don’t print any of it, or you’ll ruin the whole train of thought and the reasoning behind it.”

I asked Jerry about his letter 64 years after it was published, and he couldn’t recall what journalistic offense had prompted it or whether it was he or Pattie who wrote it. There is another letter that Jerry alone wrote that was published about a year later. In this one, he expressed his disappointment at a few misrepresentations of Alice in Wonderland he had noticed in an editorial.

Jerry was a long-time fan of Alice. Using his IBM Selectric typewriter, he corresponded several times with Martin Gardner regarding Gardner’s book The Annotated Alice some time after it was published in 1960. In The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition, Gardner mentioned him in two places and included some of Jerry’s insights about the text. The book also cites an article written by Bill Gaffney.

In 1955, Jerry graduated magna cum laude from the University of Nebraska with a Bachelor of Science degree. He was nominated for the Phi Beta Kappa (humanities) and Pi Mu Epsilon (mathematics) honor societies. His curriculum vitae also lists the Sigma Xi science honor society, though it doesn’t say when that happened. He was ranked third in a class of about 5000, but he remembers marching in to the graduation ceremony at the front of the line, next to the man who was first. Second place was a woman, and she was required to march behind them. It’s not clear why the school did this to her. Jerry felt bad because she was treated unfairly.

The record isn’t quite clear on what subjects he majored in. Jerry consistently claimed to have majored in both physics and mathematics. But he told me and others that he also majored in English and philosophy, for a total of four majors. He has also said that the university only allowed two majors, so it seems plausible that he may have met the requirements for all four, but was only officially recognized for two of them.

In addition, Jerry earned honors in all four subjects by completing these special projects:

• Physics–reproduced the Michelson-Morley experiment (in 1887, it helped to disprove aether theory and eventually led to special relativity).
• Math–competed in an annual math competition and took second place (the son of the head of the math department took first place).
• English–wrote an essay, the subject of which is long forgotten.
• Philosophy–studied and wrote about some of Isaac Newton’s philosophical work.

Much later, in 2008, Jerry was among the first people inducted into the Nebraska Hall of Computing that’s sponsored by the University of Nebraska. He thought this was funny, given that he had asked to study computers when he was a student there, but there was none to be found anywhere on the campus. The other five honorees for that year are pictured wearing suits in formal portraits. Jerry’s picture shows him in an action shot wearing casual clothes and a lanyard. Formalities never seemed necessary to him.

The next installment is: Jerry at Berkeley.

In this installment of Jerry’s Story, I’m not going to risk turning a lively discussion into a pile of sterile facts. I’ll present the email discussion we had with little editing.

We were talking about whether having unlimited access to ice cream might lead to weight gain, and how he gained so much weight he was offered a football scholarship. But it wasn’t just the ice cream.

---

(Jerry Weinberg) I was a champion eat-contest participant. My specialties were watermelon, pie, and hot dogs.

(Danny Faught) You’re still full of surprises! What age did that start, and what got you started?

I must have been 15. In Omaha. The first one I recall was at a birthday party. I ate 36 hot dogs.

Then, at the University of Nebraska, they held these contests fairly regularly.

I imagine that this was a cultural trend at the time. Seems that would make it expensive to throw a birthday party, though, supplying all that food. 

What kind of prizes did you win from competitive eating?

I don’t recall. They must have been insignificant. Besides, it was the glory that I was after.

How long did you continue to compete before you lost interest?

I never lost interest, but once I had Crohn’s Disease, my eating habits had to change drastically.

How did you feel about winning? (Or in other cases, not winning?)

Mostly I won. I was very good, and knew the secrets. Like not worrying about seeds in the watermelon, and managing to spill most of the melon on the floor as I swung my mouth back and forth.

This would be a very different kind of watermelon time. 🙂

Indeed.

How did I feel? I expected to win, so it was no big deal. I suppose I would have felt bad if I had lost, but if I lost, I must have felt so bad that I erased all memory of it.

How did you learn the secrets that helped you win?

Through experience, I guess.

So nobody cared that so much of the watermelon was on the floor rather than in your stomach?

Not at all. Watermelon spectators expect a certain amount of slop on the floor. In fact, that’s one of the attractions, different from polite everyday life.

Was this an attraction to you, to have permission to make a mess?

I don’t think I ever needed permission for that.

Awesome. Tell me more about messes you made.

While eating?

Whatever you were thinking about when you said you never needed permission to make a mess.

In general, I’ve lived by the credo that it’s better to ask forgiveness after than permission before. I was always doing new things that people didn’t understand until after they’d seen the results.

Who else do you know who follows this credo? Any examples of them having similar successes as you, or ever having big regrets about it?

I recall discussing this with Ken Iverson, creator of APL (and a good friend). He was certainly successful.

I think I may have learned it from Jim Turnock, my boss for a while at IBM, who headed the Mercury (IBM) projects.

Have you counseled people to stop asking for permission?

Many.

I can recall cases of you telling me *to* ask for permission, like when asking someone for a hug.

Yes, that’s definitely a case where you should honor another’s personal space.

Examples? Well, there’s all the many experiential exercises I’ve concocted. People generally didn’t understand why I didn’t just lecture, so I never asked permission, and some of those exercises definitely looked like messes.

And that’s just one example, with dozens of sub-examples.

Are these the attitudes of the people participating in the exercises?

Well, I should correct myself a bit here. I always ask permission of the participants. As you may recall, before any exercise, but with particular emphasis on new, untried ones, I always remind people of their right to refuse or to drop out. That way, I always have permission, because they have permission to take care of themselves. And, I make sure they don’t have to ask permission if they want to drop out. Nor do they have to explain why they want to.

How does it go from looking like a mess to being a great success? (Depends on who thinks it’s a mess, I think.)

You’re right. But, for example, in some exercises we make a great physical mess (as in House of Cards, which winds up with cards all over the walls, floor, and even ceiling). Even then, make the mess part of the exercise, and try to make it reversible (no permanent damage to the premises).

Sometimes, though, an exercise makes a “mess” of a participant’s model of the world. That’s really the point of the exercise, but I always try to work with that participant to make a new model to replace the mess.

What’s another example of not asking permission?

One great example was in the Mercury Project. To do a real-time system on the IBM 709, we needed an interrupt clock, and there wasn’t one on IBM’s machine. We did ask for one to be built, but IBM refused. So, we just snuck into the factory and soldered in our own interupter without telling anyone.

The funny part of this story is that when a machine arrived in Bermuda, it was a different machine, so we had to put in another interrupter. And we never did find out who got the other machine, and if they even noticed the non-standard interrupter.

---

 

And that’s where we left it. Several months later, Jerry sent me a news article about the winner of the Nathan’s Famous hot dog eating contest, adding “I was never in his class.” This prompted me to try several different angles to learn more about the context of his competitive eating experiences. I got a few more facts, but nothing that really furthered the story. I searched the student newspaper for the University of Nebraska to see if he was ever mentioned as a winner, and I came up empty, but I did uncover several other interesting things about his college experience to talk about. And that’s how the stream of consciousness of our discussions went.

The next installment is Jerry, The Student (Undergrad Years).

Yesterday the news of Jerry Weinberg’s death was announced. I have lost a friend and a mentor. I am sad, but like many others, I am also feeling a great deal of gratitude for Jerry’s life. He was kind, and brilliant, and so many other things that I plan to share to the best of my ability. He lived a full life. An oversized life. This earth is better for his presence. I’m not going to try to write a summary of his accomplishments right now–that would fill a book, and that’s what’s I’m trying to do a little bit at a time.

My biography project has turned a corner. From now on, the new information I gather must come from indirect sources rather than directly from Jerry’s own vivid memories. Knowing that Jerry wouldn’t be around forever, I focused on asking him about events early in his life that would be hard to know from any other source. There are a still a few subjects that will be difficult to research, like his programming experiences before he started consulting on broader topics. I hope I can count on some of the thousands of people who were touched by Jerry to help me understand more about his story.

I am so happy that I started sending him my barrage of countless questions a few years ago, which he patiently answered. The biography project was somewhat of an artificial catalyst for us to start interacting more than we ever did before, but we were both pleased to have the motivation to swap stories with each other. This was how it all started:

I asked him if he ever thought about writing about early computer history, and he replied, “I’ve thought about it, but it’s not my cup of tea. But why don’t you write it?” I found out later that when people pitch book ideas to him, he often reflects these requests back to where they came from. When it became clear that the project would work better as a biography, he was even more insistent that someone other than him should write it. No one else seemed to be doing it, so I decided to give it a try.

Since then, I have logged more than 300 pages worth of conversations with him. It will take some work to turn it into cohesive chapters, but I’m enjoying the process of organizing the extensive set of fieldstones I’ve collected while also still adding to the pile (see Jerry’s book Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method if you don’t know why I’m referring to stones). Recently, his replies had slowed their pace, until this, the last email he ever sent me–

TOO SICK TO WRITE.

SEND MUCH LATER.
JERRY

Jerry still has a lot to say to us all. He has left behind a rich legacy for us still to discover. Rest well, my friend. You have sent us much.

 

Next up: Competitive Eating–Permission to Make a Mess

If you haven’t been following along, you might want to see the home page for Jerry’s Story for links to other installments.. This is the 7th installment in the series.

Delving into Jerry’s experiences as a student takes us back to some of his earliest memories, even before starting school. In this installment of Jerry’s Story, we’ll explore Jerry Weinberg’s childhood and schooling through high school, with a few peeks beyond. We’ll cover other childhood experiences like Scouting and sports. Jerry and I have done our best to accurately document his memories, some of which are more than 80 years old. We might not have gotten all of it right, but I’ve done the best fact-checking I can.

Jerry remembers as early as age 3 how he spent time with the neighborhood gang in his Chicago neighborhood, hanging out in the alley and on the tops of the garages that opened up to the alley. It didn’t occur to him at the time to ask who owned the garages, and the homeowners never seemed to catch them there.

He was too young to be aware of any major illegal activities the older members of the gang may have been up to, but he did get involved with the fighting with other nearby gangs. He remembers that someone threw a brick that hit him in the head. When he was about 6 years old, Jerry had an altercation with a bully after school. He was within sight of his own house, where his father was watching from the porch. Jerry appealed for his dad to save him, but his dad said he had to take take of it himself. So he wrestled with the bully and threw him off of another nearby porch, breaking the bully’s arm in the process. Jerry’s dad seemed to be proud of him. This had a big effect on his sense of self-reliance.

Another formative moment was when Jerry visited an elementary school for the first time. This was at Gregory Elementary School, which Jerry would also later attend. Jerry says –

I must have been three or four. My mother took me with her for a conference with my older sister Charlotte’s teacher. I was given a brush and an easel with about six pots of paints. I painted a garage, but the only way I could think of to indicate the wooden siding was a rainbow series of stripes, using every color I had.

When the conference was over, the teacher came over for the first interaction I’d ever had with a teacher, one I’ll never forget.

She said, “That’s nice. What is it?”

“A garage.”

“Oh, no,” she corrected. “Garages don’t have rainbow stripes.”

My first experience with schooling, one I remembered when we finally had a garage that needed painting, outside of Lincoln. I’ll let you guess what I did.

Later, in Colorado, I ran across someone else’s garage painted in rainbow stripes. Take that, teacher!

Jerry had a lesson in how things can be done differently than you expect when he visited the Brookfield Zoo. He remembers watching a gorilla eat an orange by putting it whole in its mouth, then spitting out the peel. This wasn’t a technique he was physically able to try. But much later in life, he learned how chimpanzees peel bananas from the bottom, though he had always opened them from the stem end before. He decided to learn a lesson from the chimps, so he now opens his bananas from the bottom.

When he was 6 years old, Jerry saw his first movie. It was a horror movie, The Cat and the Canary. He saw it in a theater, because that was the only way to see a movie in the 1930s. He was sitting in the last row with a wall right behind him. He still remembers the scene where a bony hand reached out of a secret panel in the wall and stole a necklace from a woman in bed. This scene spooked him so much that he still doesn’t like to sit in the last row of seats in a room against the wall. Maybe that wasn’t the most useful lesson he could have learned.

When he was 7 years old, Jerry’s family moved to northern Chicago. Jerry transferred to Daniel Boone Elementary School. He was exceedingly bored at school. By the time he was in fourth grade, school officials had skipped him two grade levels ahead. His IQ was measured at 181. He was separated from the rest of the kids most of the school day and was taught by a private tutor. The tutoring generally went well, except for the day that his tutor told him he had learned all of the math that there was (he was sure this just meant he had learned everything that the tutor was able to teach).

Jerry’s favorite activity in elementary school was recess, even though he was often bullied by the other students. He did well at playing “line-ball,” where someone would bounce a ball against a wall and they would all try to catch it. He wasn’t very good at throwing the ball, but he excelled at catching it. His success at line-ball did not lead to more bullying, though his academic success did.

The troubles he had as one of the “smart kids” are reflected in a passage he wrote many decades later in his fiction book Quantum String Quartet–

Anyone who’s ever been smart knows you have to hide your power. Otherwise, people try to control you, to take advantage of it.

In elementary school, Jerry didn’t know how to hide his intelligence in order to escape from the bullying. He did eventually figure it out, and has learned from the experiences of other smart people. He now likes to teach people how to be happy “in spite of their intelligence.”

Jerry almost won a spelling bee while in fourth grade. He made it to the final round–he was up against an eighth grader. He was given the word “vertices,” which was not a word he was familiar with. Nonetheless, he produced the spelling v-e-r-t-i-c-e-s, but the judges told him he was wrong. They said the correct spelling is “vertexes.” After missing out on victory, he went home and looked up the word, finding that both spellings were valid. He protested the outcome of the spelling bee, but this didn’t change the result. The sense of unfairness that Jerry felt from this stayed with him for the rest of his life.

There was a formative experience in music class at Boone. The teacher didn’t like the sound of his voice, so when the class was singing, she told him to lip-sync silently. This may have suppressed any desire he might have had to sing. Still, since then he has made music with a kazoo, a jug, a washboard, and a gut bucket, as well as playing a bugle at Scout Camp. He long had a desire to learn to play bagpipes, and he acquired a practice chanter that beginning bagpipe players use to learn, but never got very far in learning. He says he’s envious of those who have developed their music talents. However, he has always loved listening to music.

Jerry’s sister had a 78 rpm record player and only one album–Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. He listened to the symphony repeatedly. In college, he would study in the library while listening to Mozart. He later bought a hi-fi and could afford only one album, Mozart’s Hunt Quartet. He now has recordings of all of Mozart’s compositions, and many other classical works.

When he completed the 8th grade at Boone Elementary School (there was no middle school between primary and secondary school), the teachers there wanted to send him to the University of Chicago, which had a policy of accepting bright students straight out of the 8th grade. However, the university was three hours away by streetcar to the south side of Chicago. Jerry’s parents didn’t want to send him to a dorm (likely because of his age or the cost, or both). So he went on to high school. Jerry wasn’t enthusiastic about college at this point, so he was happy with this decision.

Because he had skipped two grades, he was only 12 years old when he started high school as a freshman. He lied to his classmates about his age so he could blend in better. There had been talk earlier in elementary school about skipping him ahead one more grade level, but he refused to do this because this would have put him in the same grade as his older sister, who had skipped a grade herself. If he started attending classes with his older sister, it would be much harder to hide the fact that he had skipped ahead.

He had a scare when everyone in gym class took a physical ability test. The results were normalized by age, and the gym teachers used his true age for the calculations. His young age gave his scores a boost, and Jerry was pronounced the best athlete in the high school. The gym teachers couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t proud of this feat. He was nervous that the other students would do the math and figure out that he won because he was so much younger than them. But as far as he knew, none of the other students ever learned his true age. That included his 14 year old girlfriend, who would have been mortified to know she was dating a 12 year old boy.

For several years, Scouting was an important part of Jerry’s life. He was a Cub Scout, and then he moved up to a Boy Scout troop. As a Boy Scout, he still volunteered to help with Cub Scout meetings. He quickly rose to the rank of Eagle Scout. One positive memory that he has from scouting was the the clear structure for earning awards. In many parts of his life before and after his experiences as a Boy Scout, Jerry felt he was denied the awards he had earned. In contrast, he felt that the non-competitive criteria for earning merit badges and ranks in the Boy Scouts were fairly administered. But again, he worried about his classmates discovering his age difference.

Though a Boy Scout can remain a youth member until age 18, teenagers often drop out of Scouting around the time they enter high school because they find other activities more compelling. Jerry didn’t want to look childish to his older peers, so he stopped going to his Boy Scout troop’s activities shortly after starting high school. He doesn’t recall anyone in his troop asking him why he hadn’t come back, and he had no friends in the troop that he missed seeing. He had been getting increasingly annoyed at having to travel to the troop meetings that were a significant distance from his house.

Eagle Scouts are now encouraged to mention their Eagle rank on their resume to give them an advantage in the job market. But that wasn’t the case for Jerry when he was a Boy Scout. He never mentioned it on a resume and it didn’t occur to him to bring it up to anyone at all. He says it was like his stamp collecting–something that didn’t seem worth talking about.

Several of the skills Jerry learned as a Boy Scout have stuck with him, including knot tying, recognizing trees, sewing, woodwork, electrical wiring, and first aid. He has bandaged a lot of wounds since his scouting days. The most dramatic use of first aid skills was when he was attending the University of Nebraska. He was using a circular saw while building a homecoming display for his residence house. Someone bumped into him, causing the saw to cut his thigh so deeply that he could see the bone. Several pre-med students who were nearby came over. Three of them fainted after seeing the wound, and the rest didn’t do anything to help. Jerry tore off his shirt and made a tourniquet for himself. He used a hammer he found nearby to tighten the tourniquet. He was angry with the other students for not helping, and he even had trouble convincing someone to take him to the student health center. Jerry was awake while a doctor sewed up his leg. The doctor wanted to reassure him that the wound wasn’t too bad, so he told the story of how he had recently treated a farmer who had tried and failed to kill himself by shooting himself with a shotgun, giving graphic details of the wounds. This did not help Jerry get through the experience, of course. He still has a 4-inch scar from the injury.

Jerry was bored with many of his high school classes. One experience didn’t help; as he describes it–”I’m in English class and we had to read a novel. HAD to read a novel, like who wouldn’t want to read a novel?” The assigned novel was The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy.  He read the portion of the book that had been assigned, and decided that he liked the book, so he finished reading it in one evening. The next day, the teacher led a discussion on the assigned reading. Jerry’s contribution to the discussion revealed that he knew what happened later in the book. The teacher rebuked him for reading ahead, which has stuck with him as being a ridiculous thing to complain to him about.

Jerry has much fonder memories of his auto shop class. He learned engine repair in this class, which is something that was lacking in his time working in his dad’s body shop. He remembers rebuilding a tank engine with pneumatic automatic transmission. He also took a course in electricity, where he built a small electric motor. There was no coverage of electronics, just basic electricity. He didn’t really have opportunities to tinker with electronics. He did enjoy using a ham radio to listen to radio programs from across the world. He used to hide it in his bed when he was supposed to be asleep. And he tinkered with a pinball machine that his father had, adjusting solenoids and relays.

Another useful class was print shop, where he learned how to set movable type. The students didn’t get to operate the printing press, but they learned a lot about formatting documents. Jerry learned the origin of the meaning of “upper case” and “lower case” (there were two separate cases for the type, with the upper case type conventionally propped up higher and behind the lower case). He felt that his hands-on experience with formatting documents physically in the print shop helped him later with using a computer to build documents, and he saw that others who didn’t have this kind of print shop experience struggled more with formatting documents. The print shop printed all of the school’s paperwork, including hall passes. Jerry is coy about whether all of these hall passes were used by authorized personnel.

Jerry remembers an important lesson on approximation from his trigonometry teacher. Jerry had been opposed to using any kind of approximations, thinking that it’s far better to do only fully precise calculations. What he didn’t know at the time was that he had already been using approximations any time he used a slide rule or a table to do a calculation. Drawing on his war-time experiences in the Army, the teacher explained how to do a milliradian (or “mil”) approximation. Jerry said he objected to using an approximation. Though most of Jerry’s teachers would have squelched his objections, the trig teacher listened. I’ll let Jerry tell the rest of it:

Unlike most of my teachers, he took my objections seriously, so he told us a story. He described Big Bertha, the largest cannon ever built. It could send a tonnish projectile over thirty miles through the air. ‘It could have been fired across the English Channel and into a trench in France.’

He then did two calculations: the most exact trig calculation, using tables (which were, of course, still approximations), and the mil approximation. Then he computed the difference. I don’t remember the exact number, but I do remember his exact sentence: ‘If you hit your enemy soldier in the left eye or the right eye, it doesn’t matter.’

In his last semester at Omaha Central High School, there was one last math class he hadn’t taken yet–solid geometry. Jerry remembers that the teacher was blonde, beautiful, and old, that is, probably 22 years old, which to 15-year-old Jerry, was really old. He found the class interesting for a few days. Then he finished the textbook and got bored listening to the lectures. Maybe because of boredom, and maybe because he wanted to win the teacher’s attention, he started acting up in class. She only tolerated this for a day or two before she talked to him about it after class. When she asked what was wrong, he said that he was bored, thinking that this was a smart alec remark that would get a rise out of her. But she took it seriously, saying “There’s not a whole lot to this subject. Not really enough for me to fill up a whole semester. So what interests you?” Still trying to be a smart alec, he replied “Gambling.”

“Oh,” she said. “That’s good. I don’t know much about gambling, but I’ve heard there’s a lot of math to it. It’s called probability or statistics.” This was news to him, and he also really liked that she wasn’t speaking down to him. Then she said, “I have an idea that might not be boring.”

“What’s that?”

“Instead of hanging around in this boring class, you could go to the library and learn about probability and statistics applied to gambling, then you could come to class and I’ll give you an hour to teach the others about it. What do you think?”

Jerry jumped at the chance and studied like a fiend all semester, focusing on the game of craps. During the final week, he gave his lecture, working out all the odds in craps. He doesn’t think his classmates enjoyed it much, but he had a great time doing it. The way the teacher dealt with him in this class left a permanent impression on him.

Jerry has a broad interest in competitive and recreational sports–he calls himself a sports dilettante. Though he wasn’t usually committed enough to excel in a sport, he would study the sport extensively so that he understood it intellectually even better than the more serious participants.

There wasn’t so much study involved with his brief try at boxing in his Boy Scout troop. All of the boys had watched boxing on television, but otherwise didn’t have any training when they put on boxing gloves and went at it. In Jerry’s first bout, he won with a knockout, and he got excited about doing more boxing. He fantasized about being a star boxer like Joe Louis. Then a week later, he faced off against the same opponent again, but this time it was Jerry who was knocked out. All of his excitement about boxing dried up at that point. Getting a knockout was fun, but he didn’t want to be knocked out ever again.

Jerry enjoyed playing 16-inch softball. Softball had originated there in Chicago, with a ball with a 12-inch circumference, and the 16-inch variant was a direct descendent of the original game. Jerry’s contemporaries just knew the game as “baseball” or “softball.” This variant used 10 players on the field, and none of them wore gloves. This was slow-pitch softball–he remembers that there were a lot of hits and few strikeouts.

Jerry worked as a caddie at Tam O’Shanter Country Club near Chicago for part of a summer. He would sometimes work for 72 holes in one day while carrying two golf bags. Working as a caddie allowed him to play golf when the club wasn’t open, because he otherwise couldn’t afford to play. He says he was a pretty good golfer.

Tam O’Shanter sometimes hosted national golf tournaments. At one of them, he got to meet Joe Louis. Though Louis was best known as a boxer, he also had an interest in golf. Jerry listened to the white members of the country club make bigoted remarks about Joe, who was African-American. Jerry’s school was well integrated, so he hadn’t heard much of that kind of talk before. It made him feel so awful that he quit being a caddie right after the tournament.

Jerry also tried working as a tennis ball boy. He never played tennis, though, because the players where he worked treated him with contempt. He had no interest in playing tennis with people who would treat a ball boy like that.

He tried basketball on a club team in Chicago–at 6 feet 3 inches, he was a tall center for the time. He earned the nickname “Swede” because of his height, blond hair, and blue eyes, but not because of any actual Swedish heritage. His coach didn’t seem to know much about basketball, though, because his philosophy was “never pass, dribble as far as you can, then shoot.” Jerry’s team never won a game.

At 240 pounds, Jerry was a good candidate for his high school football team. Players on his team played on both the defense and the offense. Jerry tended to play center on the offense and end on the defense. None of the players wore helmets, and he says it’s a wonder he can recall anything after playing football without a helmet. The coach was abusive to the players on his team. At one game, the coach managed to get the opposing team’s star player isolated from the rest of his team. The coach ordered his own team to surround him and the opposing player so no one else could see what was happening, then the coach kicked him in the stomach. Jerry quit the team after that. This experience left him with a lasting distrust of all authority figures.

Jerry had much more fun playing for a local club team that was sponsored by the Chicago Bears and coached by two of their players. He stayed on that team until his family moved to Omaha near the end of his junior year. He was later offered a scholarship to play football at an NCAA Division II school, Drake University in Iowa. At the time he got the offer, however, he had no plans to go to college, so he turned it down.

In high school in Omaha, Jerry tried track and field sports like the mile run and shot put. He had some success with this, earning a few third place ribbons.

As the end of his high school tenure at Omaha Central High School drew near, there were a few more disappointing events where Jerry felt he was treated unfairly. The student commencement speaker was going to be chosen using an audition. Jerry wrote a speech and went to the audition, where he found six other students, each accompanied by a teacher acting as sponsor. He hadn’t heard that he needed to have a sponsor. The judges weren’t sure what to do with him. They gave him a chance to audition his speech, but it didn’t appear that anyone was listening. The teacher sponsors talked to their students while Jerry gave his speech. Of course, his speech was not chosen. It may not have been a stellar speech, but he would have liked to have a fair chance with it.

At graduation, the school gave awards to the students who had taken all eight math glasses that they offered and earned an A in all of them. Jerry had taken several math classes in Chicago, and after moving to Omaha, he took every advanced math class they had, getting a higher grade than all the other students each time. And yet, he got no award. When he asked about this, the answer was “How do we know your Chicago high school had the same high standards as Central?” Because he had taken some of his math classes at a different school, he was not eligible for the award. Because all of his grades from Chicago were discounted, he had no chance of being valedictorian. He didn’t receive any awards from the school at all. It’s easy to imagine the level of disappointment this would have caused.

The people who ran Omaha Central must have felt they had a reputation to protect. Jerry remembers them proudly asserting that they were the second best high school in the nation. He never heard who had done this ranking, or whether there was any desire to take the number one spot. Since then, Jerry has counted 20 different people who assert completely seriously that their own high school is the second best in the nation.

In the next installment, we’ll continue to follow Jerry’s education into college and beyond. Here’s a teaser. Jerry went to a birthday party in Omaha when he was about 15 where he ate 36 hot dogs. This was the beginning of a new activity for him that continued into college. Watch for more about this unlikely competitive eating champion.

Next up: Jerry’s Story: In Memoriam