Memoir

Stephanie Miller is a radio talk show host with a devoted national following, nowhere more than in Madison, Wisconsin. She's on the local progressive radio station, 92.1 the Mic, from 8:00 AM to 11:00 AM CST and has been for close to ten years (the poor thing starts at 6:00 AM in LA, aka insane o'clock). She's done shows in Madison at the Barrymore Theater four or five times and always sells out far ahead of time. Some friends and I went the first time - she was broadcasting the show from Madison, so out of bed at 6:00 and on the street at 6:30 to join the stream of people passing my door, two blocks down from the theater.

Bill O'Reilly had just said Madison people communed with Satan and a good number of the patrons had little Satan hats on that lit up the dark theater - blink, blink, blink all around. Stephanie has this running gag that she's a sot, box wine her favorite, so she starts in on that and a good 25% of the audience raised their beer cups in salute. That set her back for a moment, which was funny right there - you're in Wisconsin now, baby!

After driving truck for eleven years, it was time for a change. Education was important in my household coming up. I have a Latin book from a great-great-grandfather on Mom's side. Half of Mom's family were teachers, including her parents for brief stints as young people in Iowa - two of my first cousins became Math and Computer Science professors in Canada. Mom did her entire high school through correspondence on the plains of Saskatchewan; she said trig just about sunk her. Dad too, where education was seen as a deliverance from poverty. He was an engineering student at the University of Manitoba and struggled through school for many years, having to support himself from a very young age. Struggled academically too, but was in awe of mathematics. I told him once as a kid I wanted to be an engineer like him; he said, oh no, shoot higher - go for mathematics. I still have his calculus book and gave his rebound copy of Men of Mathematics to my daughter Lydia when she graduated with a major in mathematics. On occasion I'd get some recognition at school, the honor roll or something, and would throw it aside as of little interest. Later it would appear framed and on the wall in Dad's home office. I essentially ended up teaching software engineering, that was typically my job title when working in the field; I think he would've been Ok with that.

We moved around a lot when I was a kid, people always asked if my Dad was in the army. No, he was a construction superintendent for S S Kresge, later to become Kmart. He was born in Winnipeg in 1914. The family was large and poor, a poverty that sat heavily on an unhappy family and was close to an obsession for all of them. Aunt Sonya's stories at 75 sounded like they had happened the day before and it was like that with Dad. Grandma was a strait-laced Irish lady, grandpa an illerate elevator operator at the train station. I remember visiting her in Los Angeles when I was thirteen or so. I'm named after her revered brother, who died young, and she sat me down and told me never to forget that I'm Irish (I'm 25% Irish). They say the Nazis are bad, but they're nothing compared to the British, who oppressed us for hundreds of years. Brash even at that age, I wasn't so stupid as to utter a word of opposition. The girls were to start in show business in order to meet wealthy men and find one to marry; the boys' path was education. The girls left home in their teens and became show girls (I've got pictures!). Uncle Wally got a PhD, but Dad was on the ten year plan for an engineering degree at the University of Manitoba. Grandpa beat the boys and Dad knocked him down once when he was starting in on Uncle Ed, said I'll kill you next time. So that was the end of life at home and up to the gold mines at 14, the Rio Grande Mine in northern Manitoba.

I always laugh when people deprecate Catholicism as mindless superstition, because I know better from direct experience as a product of four years of Catholic high school. I started out at Jesuit High in Dallas in 1961. Mr. Joubert was my home room, religion, and English teacher. A lot of French names - it was the New Orleans Province after all, not missionaries from Chicago (like my grade school, St. Luke's in Irving). So a tip of the hat to Mr. Vavasseur, my sophomore geometry teacher, a tall, skinny, kind and intelligent man who knew and valued his subject and also knew how to transmit intellectual excitement. He was an important milestone in my mathematical education, especially considering that geometry is where students first encounter the axiomatic method and proofs, the cornerstones of modern mathematics. Between proofs, Mr Vavasseur regaled us with stories of how geometry had been the canonical science for two thousand years, even people like Spinoza modeling their philosophical speculations on Euclid. He quite rightly mentioned Giovanni Girolamo Saccheri, S. J., who foreshadowed non-Euclidean geometry. He was hell on wheels when crossed though; I remember him thundering more than once, "I'll be in Room 214 after school, Jones, be there" (emphasis on the last two words).

Flying back to Pittsburgh with an old Elmore Leonard in hand (The Big Bounce, 1969) jogged some memories. Our man Jack Ryan, someone pulled his chain, the same phrase an upperclassman used on me the first day on campus in August 1969 and the first time I'd heard it. You're in the big leagues now, boy.

What a great English teacher the first semester and after a string of them in high school; the reading list as much as anything - he was a part-timer and probably wanted an excuse to read or reread some favorites. He had Swann's Way under his arm one day. For us it was Iris Murdoch (The Severed Head), Hard Times (Gradgrind!), and Middlemarch, the last my all-time favorite after many re-readings. I remarked in class one day that among the main characters in The Severed Head, almost every possible romantic combination had been consummated or at least entertained. He liked that and rejoined that two female characters were always touching each other, seemingly casually or mistakenly, he thought it was pretty funny. He was making the point with us one day that people can walk through their own lives as zombies without even noticing their remarkable surroundings, most appropriate in the immediate environment of Pitt with the amazing buildings. He said, consider the Civil War Museum, how many columns are there in front of it? Eight, I said (Math Department reporting). He was a little miffed, as if I'd interfered with his lesson.