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These memoirs appear in two parts, in two different formats. Part I, The Windowframe has a story-line perspective on the author's experiences through the century. It is chronological, like most conventional autobiographies, dealing with causes and consequences in narrative form. It gives the author's expectations and impressions - the frame for his window.

Part II, Glimpses – Topics. Like monographs, the Glimpses focus on subjects such as travels, inventing, acting and playwriting, teaching, music, etc. Readers can choose one or both Parts, or simply choose from the menu of topics in Part II. Help yourself!

PART I - THE WINDOWFRAME

CHAPTER 1. Framework

It would be cheating to pretend that I can tell you first-hand about the first part of the 1900's, because, since I was born in 1916, my own memory didn't kick in until 1920. What

I know about those first two decades came from being born 16 years after the family started; so, inasmuch as the family dealt with those years and talked about them, I have "borrowed" their impressions.

Big changes of those early years were: advent of some autos, illumination by electricity instead of gas and candles, phones, mechanization for mass production, and rise and legitimacy of labor unions. Before going farther I must acknowledge that I am already cheating, because my parents lived in China 1902-1907, where none of the above was true. Two years after their marriage they went to Peking (Beijing) as Presbyterian missionaries, my father being a doctor. My two older sisters were born there and spoke Chinese before they spoke English. I recall hearing my parents use Chinese between themselves on occasions where they didn't want younger children to understand. Around the house we had various Chinese oddities and of course Chinese rugs. Since we lived in Tacoma on Puget Sound where I grew up, missionaries en route to or from China who traveled through the port of Seattle often visited, to or from their furloughs. Dad and Mother tried to hire a Chinese house-servant/cook again and again; but at that time, all Chinese in this country were avoiding Tacoma because its early Chinatown had been wiped out and its residents forced onto railroad boxcars in 1885, shipped to Portland, Oregon.

My parents returned from China in 1907 because of my mother's health, and possibly because Dad had contracted typhoid fever there. They were determined not to return to the eastern seaboard but instead chose to settle in Tacoma where Dad set up general medical practice. They lived only four blocks from the general hospital, and he took the streetcar to make house calls. The second year, he bought one of the first motorcars in the city. It was a one-cylinder Reo; and at night when all was quiet, you could hear it when it was almost a mile away.

Early in 1908 my brother Joe was born. When he was only an infant, his two older sisters, while playing in the basement of our house, found some excelsior (shredded wood used for packing insulation) and a box of matches. They tried lighting it to see whether it would catch fire. Of course it did, and so did the entire house. Mother escaped with the baby in her arms, and the family was taken in by neighbors. Everything was lost.

The following year, after they had moved to J street, my sister Alice was born - making a family of six, and they moved to a large, new house on Ainsworth Avenue. I knew every inch of it.

People heated their houses either with coal or with wood. We burned "mill ends" and slabs from the lumber mills. Ice was manufactured by ammonia process and delivered by horse and wagon. The horse itself knew where to stop, from house to house, on the route. I recall seeing horse-drawn fire engines. Men worked six days per week and vacations were rare. Many worked 10-12 hours per day. Holidays were big - with people staying at home, with all stores and facilities closed.

Unless they were laborers, men wore three-piece suits; collars and cuffs that detached for starching; always a hat; and no open necks. Dandies wore spats. Women had no legs; just feet. Their dresses flared up from the ground to a narrowed, corset-restrained waist, and their arms usually were covered. Bathing suits were like one-piece underwear with arms and legs. Children wore button patent leather shoes. (You needed a button hook to get dressed.) There were hook-and-eye fastenings, and "snaps" - metal loops that fitted around a protruding knob, to hold up your stockings. Little boys wore undershirts and underpants plus a "waist" that had these fasteners attached. Most of us couldn't dress ourselves without assistance until we were four or five.

There were phonographs - first Edison's cylinders, then fragile record disks, with creaking renderings. People played cards and parchesi, or dominos; women were always knitting or sewing, or crocheting. The postman used to open our front door and put the mail on a table just inside. We never locked our front door unless we went out of town on a trip.

Construction work was done by gangs or men or by horses. I was impressed for my lifetime by the way workhorses would throw themselves into a hard pull - as when a digging scoop with a man steering it, would encounter a big rock during an excavation for a basement site. The horses welcomed the challenge and to want to demonstrate proudly their strength. To me it represented dedication and commitment: conquering life's handicaps. I wanted, myself, to be like those hard-working horses. And what did they get out of it? Contented munching from their nosebags during their infrequent rest periods. But they had a sense of achievement and doing their best.

People were polite and circumspect. Men tipped their hats to ladies. Some people occasionally bowed. There was a lot of concern for proper appearances. Most men smoked. No woman who cared about her reputation could be seen smoking. Women used perfume but no visible make-up. Men opened doors for women; treated them as if handicapped. Men spit: there were cuspidors (mostly-open pots on the floors) in the banks and in public buildings - big shiny ones. If you wanted to go somewhere, you walked or took a streetcar, or hired a carriage.

Big news events were announced by paperboys walking the streets, calling "Wuxtree! wuxtree! Read all about ________". Patriotism ran high, parades and Fourth of July; also the World Series and other sports.

The two big events of the 1910's were World War I and the flu. With outbreak of World War I persons with German surnames took special efforts to demonstrate their patriotism and loyalty in order to escape discriminatory ostracism. With Camp Lewis nearby, the town was filled with servicemen on weekends; and when navy ships were in the bay, with sailors on leave. Kaiser Bill was vilified. The local shipyard thrived, and other industries received their spurts.

Secondly, directly in the wake our going to war, came the flu epidemic. Hardly a family of any size escaped it. Deaths occurred by the hundreds between l917 and 1919. Dad was deeply

involved, often sleeping only four to six hours per night. Big brother Joe, then about 12, began driving the car for Dad between calls on sick patients, in order to give him some rest time of his own.

Yet another development at that same time was introduction of Prohibition: it came in Washington state a year before the Volstead Act by the Congress. Its emphasis on temperance suited the mood of a nation at war and a time when a plague of flu was striking people down. Dad worked hard for prohibition - partly because of what he had seen as a doctor, and partly out of religious zeal. Prohibition had a great effect upon my generation: I can recall seeing only five instances of intoxication until I was 19. Nobody in high school was known to drink alcohol. We didn't know about marijuana either. People at the end of this century would not believe that such a social environment could be possible.

Our family was Puritanical, Victorian. We were not allowed to look at the comics ("funny papers") on Sunday. Sundays we only went to church and read books. (But I used to go next door to read the funnies.) Outwardly at least, it was a society that condoned and favored this way of life.

Such were some of the impressions relayed to me, and residually observed, as the 1920's began.

Now I should characterize the family members who were all-important informants as to what things were like in the years 1901-1920 - and as prompters for my expectations, in tender years, of what it means to be alive in this world.

In physical build we siblings resembled our respective parents, though our complexions and temperaments varied widely. We three males were five feet seven and about 140 pounds; the three females five feet three and about 130 pounds. All were well-coordinated and agile, with facile hands and strong voices. The oldest and youngest of the siblings had red hair and freckles.

Martha, the eldest, had a special esthetic sense and a soft awareness that was distinctively hers. She seemed to be intimate with the world - and even sometimes with something even beyond it; and what she shared of that broad awareness was always on the constructive, or at least objective, side. She never clashed seriously with anybody; she was at home in the world, always with her own sense of direction and purpose. Everything she did was done well. In her high school class of about 250 she received a special award as best all-around girl. She was 13 when I was born; so when I was only 5, she went away to college. She lived to be 92.

Rebecca, a year-and-a-half Martha's junior, who died in her late 60’s, was quite different in temperament: a worrier, overly conscientious. She was full of second thoughts because she needed to make absolutely sure she was striving to stay on the right track. She could always be counted upon for devoted, selfless help and cooperation. Becca always seemed to feel the shadow of her big sister as if not knowing whether to take umbrage in it or to escape from it.

Joe Jr. three and a half years younger than Becca, was a sociable activist - sports, music, drama, books. He had a very independent mind. At times he was strongly iconoclastic; he was also strongly idealistic - a pacifist, a pioneer in reproductive medicine, nature-lover and conservationist. Joe was also a raconteur with a broad repertory of stories, folksongs and poems. In his adolescence, which was when he was quite close to me in my childhood, he was rebellious (wouldn't wear a hat; defied convention; thought "manners" were ridiculous); but he was adventurous and showed obvious leadership talents both in school and as a Guide in Rainier National Park. Joe always had lots of good friends.

Alice (who in college changed her name to Sally) was a year and a half younger than Joe, which made her 7 years older than I. She was gregarious, outgoing, participating almost intrusively in whatever was going on; entertaining, vivacious, original. In many respects she served as mother-substitute, because my mother by that time had worn thin trying to keep abreast of four energetic offspring. Joe and Alice were a pair - in many of their activities and with mutual friends: they were busy achievers. Both learned to play the Hawaiian (steel) guitar. Each of them had aggressive opinions about everything, including how I behaved and what I was supposed to know. Part of that influence was distinctive, but much of it echoed their parents' goals. One year Joe and Alice each had a horse to ride, on loan from the horse guides at Mt. Rainier. Alice became a teacher and later a comedienne in an amateur theater, CALIFORNIA'S FIRST, in Monterey.

Philip, born unexpectedly when Mother thought she had passed the menopause, was seven years younger than I. (He was not intended to replace George who had been my intended childhood companion. George became a SIDS victim at eight months, when I was two. George had been named after Mother's fond brother, and she grieved over the infant's death for five years, until Phil was born - she often took me to his grave at the cemetery and spent time with the dead baby's clothes and nursery things. As I saw it later, she felt guilty over having insisted on going out to a social event, to leave the baby with his 14-year-old sister as a sitter, at the time of his death. SIDS was not known as such, in those days.)

When a young child, Phil was sensitive and temperamental, given to tantrums. But he proved to be talented and versatile, a gifted classical clarinetist. I sympathized with him because he seemed like a disinherited waif - as it the harbinger of a family that was dead-ending; so I tried to play the role of solicitous big brother to him. Phil later mastered Sanskrit and became a swami in the Vedanta Order of Hinduism, called the "Episcopal" sect of Hinduism.

Now for the parents of this brood, and a bit more about its heritage:

Dad's medical practice leaned heavily toward obstetrics: kids at school each year would tell me that he had delivered them into the world. Dad had a religious dedication to his calling as a family doctor, and much of his practice was done as charity. His ethics were rigid. He put his patients ahead of his family - too much, I thought. In Tacoma, together with about five or six other medical specialists, he established and operated St. Helens Clinic, located across from the YMCA and the largest of the two city newspapers. He himself treated, on the average, close to 20 patients per day; and he regularly examined applicants for several insurance companies. Dad never discussed patients, nor revealed their medical cases within the family circle: no secrets were ever divulged. But from phone conversations at mealtimes, we all became familiar with acetylsalicylic acid, thiamin, potassium chloride, etc. and with "have the waters broken yet?', which I thought was a code term for a stage of some sort of laboratory process. Dad was well educated in various areas, and he kept abreast of current medical research. A pharmacist told me, after Dad's accidental death in 1932, that he had been among the first doctors in town to include vitamins in his prescriptions. Dad used to give his children flu inoculations each fall. He never missed a meeting of the local medical society. At different times he went to the Johns Hopkins Hospital and to the Mayo Clinic to update his medical knowledge.

Dad was bald and had a paunch; he weighed about 175 at the time I was born, and kept it. Like at least half of the men of his day, he smoked: a pipe or cigars; his deodorant was tobacco. (I didn't like that!) He liked caffeine, salt, rich food, and classical music. At age 52 he tried to teach himself to play the 'cello - only to find that it was too late to develop certain requisite muscles. He had a hearty laugh and a warm smile.

So Dad had some charm, and many patients depended upon his medical charisma as much as upon the pills. I suspect he used to offer to pray with some of his patients. At home however, Dad was not so out-going; he was stern and somewhat formal - possibly trying to emulate his own father as ruler of the house. He had only one usable eye - the left one, I believe - though nobody outside of the family knew it, because we children were told never to reveal that fact to outsiders because it could ruin his medical practice. Soon after he returned from China Dad had arranged that his bad eye be "tattooed" so as to match his good eye, to make it look normal; and fortunately his bad eye always appeared to be correctly in line with the good one. He wore pince-nez glasses with a trifocal lens that was duplicated even for the dead eye.

My father's reputation in our town was solid, both in his profession and as a good citizen. He did not hobnob with big shots, for he was too religious-centered to take part in politics or to engage in the playtime activities of the local upper class which his religious views placed off limits for him. His avowed models were Puritanical, classical and pietistic. But he also loved vaudeville, theater and jokes. Intellectually, he was a liberal. On the emotional side however, he was archly conservative. I never heard him use an off-color or profane word - even to himself.

Mother was different. She was 12 years younger than her husband, having married to him at 17. Devoted to, and wholly dependent upon him, she played a subordinate role except for the trump card of physical weakness, which she could finesse adroitly when needed. Mother had had a year at a "finishing school" for women. She was a gifted pianist and singer; she had read widely; she was well-trained in social skills, an ingratiating and versatile conversationalist. But her health was "delicate" - so much so that every once in a while she would have to take time out from the family, usually to go to a hospital to receive t.l.c.(tender loving care). For one thing, she had nervous bowel syndrome, and that was a social embarrassment. To us offspring she seemed to be a hypochondriac, though of course we were trained to take pains, inherently, not to imply that such might be the case. I suspect that her dependence upon medical expertise and solicitude had a lot to do with her marital relationship. It was necessary for us to have a live-in house-servant and cook at all times because, although she could mastermind the running of a household, she couldn't herself carry out the accompanying responsibilities and physical drudgery. Mother deferred to Dad in almost everything, but there were times when she successfully could soften his outlook; and occasionally could be an ally in keeping little secrets from him. Dad was utterly devoted to her until a latent and undiagnosed liver ailment toward the end of his life engendered such fatigue and self-concern in him that it was he, rather than she, who needed support.

Family life, for this hodge-podge of divergent personalities and egos, focused on mealtimes together. It seemed that everyone had a story to tell, urgent comments, a "vital" opinion, or some bid for attention or commendation. Silence could make it seem as if something might be awry - as if there was nobody in charge of the requisite and indispensable channels of thought. So, competition for possession of the rostrum often was intense. Lowest on the totem pole were the youngest of the tribe. But that created more chance to listen and learn. We concerned ourselves with one another's affairs; moral judgments abounded - though often tempered by humor or goodwill. Until I was about ten, once a week regularly we had family prayers at the dining table: Dad would read from the Bible; then, each kneeling at our dining room chairs, he would offer a spontaneous prayer of general nature. None of us children liked it and we knew that our friends did not do this in their families. That made it seem somewhat contrived and ostentatious. Did that please God? I used to wonder. It seemed that we did a lot of things "to please or honor God" that were more satisfying to our parents or ancestors than they were contemporary or sensible. But it was clear that having fun pleased God only marginally; and not having fun was more like what God wanted. The point was this: you can't achieve success, blest by God, if you don't follow the rules. Rules should always come before personal preference or self-indulgence. And our rules were pretty rigid - and pervasive.

I do recall one dinner-table incident that resulted in an awesome silence. Workmen had been putting in a new sidewalk past the house, and as a 9-year-old I had watched the process. "I think those workmen must be foreigners," I commented.

"What makes you think so?" Mother asked.

"Well, they say strange words that don't sound like our language".

"Those are probably just words that you don't know yet," commented Alice.

"No. They just don't sound like English."

"How do they sound?" Alice persisted. "Can't you imitate them for us?"

"Oh, like 'shit' and 'fuck'" [then words unknown to me].

There was a long pause while everybody looked intently at his/her food. Then Mother said, "Well, maybe that could be German." Turning to Dad as the usual authority, she asked: "Wouldn't that be German, Joe?"

With sudden enthusiasm Dad replied. "Yes; yes. It does indeed sound like German." Silence still prevailed for some time; so I figured this could have been one of the adults' tricks (bamboozlements).

Already the pattern of Anglo-Saxon Protestant traditions, perhaps even Scotch-Irish character, should be apparent. But not so fully was that so on Mother's side. Her maiden name was Van Gorder - Dutch, on her father's side, from New York via Ohio, but they were Protestants too. Cleanliness, my mother preached, was our major heritage from that source. Mother's mother, my maternal grandmother, named Wilson, had been the daughter of Pittsburgh aristocrats: her father had been mayor of Pittsburgh during the Civil War. That heritage also seemed to have a lot to do with our needing a household servant even in the 20th century. It had even more to do with shaping attitudes - regarding immigrant ethnic groups as laborers and how suitable Protestantism was for the privileged. Incidentally, no anti-Semitism was ever expressed at our house; I didn't even know that Hebrews and Jews were related until I was finishing high school. Nevertheless, at one point in the third grade when I made friends with David Spiegel, my parents told me to forget it, saying that his "church" was not the right kind. So it was religion, not ethnicity that was the problem. Dad had all kinds of patients including a few African Americans, and he took us children to visit them now and then. One of them had been a slave when she was a girl. She baked cakes for our birthdays, as gifts.

To compare Mother's background with Dad's, on his side there were both differences and similarities. Six generations back, the first Griggs had gone from England to Massachusetts - in 1632. That family line, mostly artisans and farmers, had intermarried with other Scots-Irish, but had always married late in life, resulting in long generations. My father's father, 5th generation in line, had graduated from Yale College early in the 19th century two centuries later, and then moved to Pennsylvania where in Pittsburgh he established a private academy of Greek and Latin. Subsequently his school was absorbed into the beginnings of the University of Pittsburgh; and Grandfather Griggs became the first Bursar of that University.

Its proved quite difficult to find out much from my parents about their origins beyond these facts, because we lived across the continent from our blood relatives, and in those days it took a letter 5 or 6 days each way to bridge the gap. But in Dad's case there was another reason: alienation had taken place between him and his two brothers. It was based partly upon his being younger and being bullied and teased by them, and partly because one of them had put out Dad's right eye by aiming at him and firing with an air rifle. Dad's mother, who had been able to tutor in French and Spanish, herself a physician's daughter, became deaf; so she couldn't mediate, nor follow the taunting and wrangling that occurred between the boys. Dad's older sister, who saw it all, often came to his rescue - and continued her guardian angel role from time to time by taking care of us children for him when Mother was "resting up" in the hospital. This "Auntie" was a dominant influence; and the heritage of Protestantism, Scottish tradition, character, and achievement emanated from her presence along with her good nature, her hearty laugh, and rigid instruction. She was also the family genealogist. In religion she was a Fundamentalist who wouldn't enter our liberal Presbyterian Church. We children enjoyed learning that when she took Dad with her to the fundamentalist First Presbyterian Church, she woke him up with her snoring.

CHAPTER 2: The Early Years

In the first years of the 20th century - and particularly after World War I - there was a conviction that change, progressing toward perfection, would lead up to utopia possibly almost within our own lifetimes. Change was synonymous with progress, which could move only in one direction: toward godliness and social harmony and prosperity. Lulled by the abundance of natural resources in this new continent and by enormous advances with power - steam and electricity - people thought American civilization was on an inexorable roll.

In school, in church, at home, in literature, we youngsters were being impressed with manifest destiny for our culture and sanctimoniously regulated capitalism as well as with our responsibilities and opportunities to perfect the world. Failure and defeat could result only from sloth or indifference. Mankind was conquering the environment and managing the world. Us kids in the 1920's were being briefed for leadership toward a paradise which, if we only strove and reached out hard enough, would yield to our touch and allow us to relish its advantages and blessings. Thus we were primed with idealism and zeal.

The world of finance likewise was caught in this upswing. Then came 1929 with its denouement when the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began.

Before we move this account forward into the years of the Great Depression, there is more to tell about the social atmosphere of the era that preceded it.

Women got the right to vote. Their status began to change to the things that men could tolerate - but only when codified suitably and whenever not in direct competition. Women began to drive cars. In fact on one occasion my mother made the front page of the local newspaper by driving her Model T Ford downhill across six intersecting streets when its brakes failed.

A few women started their own enterprises, usually home-based. Previously their employment opportunities were limited to being teachers, seamstresses, nurses, domestics, waitresses, secretaries or store clerks. Now beauty parlors were added; and telephone operators became a big thing. That women should cease their homemaking functions nevertheless still was not envisioned, and competitive salaries, except for a few professionally qualified women, were unthinkable. There was some minor, suppressed consternation when it became public knowledge that the highly competent, married pathologist at the General Hospital was not Allen, but Ellen. Of course she left immediately despite absence of a qualified replacement - leaving people buzzing about who had known about it all along, and why only in silence.

Labor organization thrived. Times were good; profits were good. Work hours were reduced, and wage rates improved. The standard of living was rising. Horizons for recreation - and supporting facilities - were expanding. It did indeed seem possible for a person to rise up economically by dint of hard work. Large corporations became larger; governmental agencies became more active. Child labor was reduced and schools were improved. Public safety was upgraded. Technological advances boosted productivity and convenience. Transportation moved faster, through ever-broadening networks.

Communism became anathema. This was because Communism elevated women indiscriminately, thus undercutting the family. Communism denied God; it appeared to condone violence as a political tool; it denied or compromised personal freedom; it eliminated free and open competition; it denied the right to amass and use capital under private initiative; it concentrated the power of the government. Communism opposed the very dynamics that appeared to make the American pattern succeed.

Then, as the l920's progressed, undercurrents of dissatisfaction and rebellion gradually began to arise: defiance of Prohibition, relaxation of sexual mores, increased divorces, strikes, graft, new social and religious ideologies, corporate ruthlessness, political indifference. But none of these trends was strong enough to endanger the vigor of capitalist economy - that is, until the stock market crash in 1929.

At first the crash was seen as only a temporary setback, or so people expected. But then, as commercial and industrial endeavors began to shrink or collapse, jobs were lost and the very real impact of the Depression began. Dad lost many thousands of dollars in the crash; but the bigger impact was new poverty among his patients. Various ones gave us vegetables or other things in lieu of paying for medical services. People moved away, or just disappeared, often back into the countryside or to live with distant relatives. In school the effects became apparent in the patched clothing and curtailed activities of my schoolmates. People were living by barter and by their wits, changing occupational skills and learning new ways. Opportunities came only through acquaintances, friends, or the grapevine. Large masses of men took to the roads, especially the railroads; men roamed cities and towns looking for odd jobs or for handouts of food. Women remained dependent mainly upon their relatives. It was not a time of lax morality however: just the opposite. And crime did not increase. During the Depression years, people adjusted to whatever they could - without losing their self-respect - by holding onto their integrity as best they could, and without rebelling or turning to violence.

By midpoint in the 1930's the picture improved when New Deal programs began to operate full-tilt. We saw the young men of the CCC working in the woods. The Public Works Administration was conducting projects of public worth; and employment of sorts was made available through the Works Progress Administration.

What had happened to the idealism and optimism of the previous decade, buoyed as it was by World War I's success? Strangely enough, it had become so much a part of people's outlooks that it seemed to carry them, in blind faith, through the depression years. The basic patterns of social and economic life did not undergo a drastic change; and under the phenomenon or gradual economic recovery that climaxed during World War II, the old patterns and outlooks were largely reinstated. Perhaps it happened so because winning the war made re-establishment of a flourishing capitalist economy and renewed social cooperation essential in order for the nation to survive.

CHAPTER 3: The 30's

For the family and me, the twelve years from 1927 to 1939 were crowded with pivotal events - my ages 11 to 23. Martha had married a Ph.D. Chemist, Henry Frank, whom she had met while at the University of Pittsburgh, and the two of them had gone to Canton, China, where he was teaching in Lingnan University. They regarded themselves as missionary workers, albeit in academic guise. They were to be there in Canton for more than twenty years, raising three children and surviving both China's war with Japan and then later, the Communist revolution of l949-50. Henry himself was imprisoned by the Japanese; later excoriated by the Chinese Communists when he returned to Canton after the war; and still later lavishly apologized to, and entertained, by them. He became Chairman of the Chemistry Department at University of Pittsburgh.

Rebecca, who taught also for two years in Canton, married and had a daughter. She married a brother of the wife of my mother's brother, her aunt by marriage - a cross-generation marriage. Joe finished his M.D. degree at the University of Michigan; began practice in a small Washington town; married a crusading activist on the summit of Mt. Rainier, and then moved to Claremont, Calif. Sally (Alice) taught French in public schools in Washington and in California, making her second marriage there, having one son. Mother, when she had become a widow of 8 years, sold the family home and moved from Washington state to Claremont, California. Phil was moved about from school to school and place to place. Thus did the family's entity seem to disintegrate.

Before that, during the 1920's, I switched from piano to 'cello at age eleven; became active in boy scouts at 13; then came church choir and church youth things, and sports after school. Between string quartet and orchestra and scouts, almost every evening of the week seemed taken.

Then in 1932 when I was 16, Dad died, at age 61. He had been worried about possibly having diabetes because something was wrong with his blood; instead, his death resulted from a fall down the basement stairs when he went down to the basement one morning to get wood for a fireplace fire. I was in math class in high school and heard the siren of the local police ambulance passing the school. Then the classroom phone summoned me to the office where they said he'd been in an accident, was in the hospital, and that I should go there. He had rapidly become unconscious from a brain concussion. Despite brain surgery, he died the next day.

With older siblings away, abroad or at college, I found myself in the position of being the man of the house, responsible for Mother and little brother. That responsibility was complicated by my guilt over having been disparaging of my father, whereas the community held him in high esteem as one of its eminent figures.

Upon Dad's sudden death we were left well off because of Dad's unusual preparations for that sort of eventuality, and because, being heavily insured with double indemnity coverage, we were left well off, financially. Dad had provided for Mother's and other family needs for years to come. It was those provisions that enabled her to send me to Europe alone in the middle of my senior high school year. That was a year later, when I was 17. (Because I had entered school at the half-year point, I could graduate either with the preceding, or following, class depending on credits accumulated.) It was to be an adventure abroad intended to "broaden his cultural horizons and elevate his intellectual aspirations". [Here the reader might like to turn to Part II, Ch. 9 "Hitler takes Germany", to see whether that happened, and why.]

Something intervened in the two summers after Dad's death however - something unforeseen that provoked motivation for the idea of giving me a European adventure.

During those two summers, when family members were able to assemble and when Martha returned on furlough from China with her three children, we went on summer retreats to a rustic island in Puget Sound, reachable only by boat, where time seemed to stand still. Sylvan, as it was called, was a sleepy un-mechanized cluster of old berry farms and summer homes with a dock and a country store, and with backwoods atmosphere. The big event each day was arrival of the steamship at the dock in front of the country store. On the narrow dirt road that led to the store and dock there had been built just before one reached a certain outlying house, a fence with a gate. One day when I was only five, Mr. Rasmussen had given me a ride on his wagon, way up on the front seat with him, behind the horse, and I was amazed to see him open the gate from his seat by pulling a rope that hung over the road. It was connected through pulleys and levers and gears, in a mechanism which lifted up the gate and put in down again to one side of the road so that we could go through. Then, even more marvelous, another rope on the other side, enabled Mr. Rasmussen to shut the gate behind him in the same manner! For several years (and still today) I wonder how it worked; but when we returned to Sylvan in 1932, that marvelous gate had disappeared when the road was widened for motorcars.

In actuality this quaint community served as a refuge for scrounging farming survivors, against their Depression hardships. It was picturesque, quaint, imbued with an aura of pioneer days. The family had vacationed there previously when I was 2-5 years old; and now we returned ten or twelve years later, to find that it had not changed except for the missing gate and widened dirt road.

Sylvan Lodge, a boarding house, its second floor encircled by open, sectioned-off sleeping porches, had been taken over by the Erickson family - refugees from the Depression, who were eking out an existence by dint of hard work and resourcefulness - which included taking in lodgers. There were two daughters my age. Ericksons' Sylvan Lodge had a couple of cows, cherry and apple trees, chickens, berry bushes, clams (including "geoducks"), salmon, and - best of all - warm hospitality. I was intrigued with the way the Ericksons coped: their resourcefulness, Ed's versatile skills, their indomitable spirit of cheerfulness - all of this in the face of economic hardship and near-disaster. I adopted Ed as a father figure and sought to learn from him as he allowed me to work with him at this farm and join him for maintenance chores. Ed gave me the Working Man's View of life and of the vicissitudes of being unemployed in a capitalist economy. New humanitarian goals emerged as outlets for the idealism that had been so carefully bred into me, and the cause of the working man seemed compatible with those religious precepts. I began to think that formal education could seem a vacuous frill compared to the way Ed confronted realities of the practical world. Why should I go to college? Where's the reality in this Culture stuff!?

Clearly such "heresy", as other family members saw it, would derail my achieving a refined intellectual or professional career. Sylvan had to be undone! - counteracted, at least. So it was arranged that I would accompany Martha and her husband to France and then take off on my own with $600 at my disposal, to absorb "Culture" in Europe for as long as I could make the $600 last. This proved to be three months, spent mainly in (then Nazi) Germany; I was away for four. (I had studied German for a year in high school and liked it; moreover, my classmates gave me a dozen names and addresses of pen-pals my age to look up in Germany.) En route, I attended the World's Fair in Chicago and met eastern relatives whom I had never seen or known.

As had been expected, my horizons broadened through foreign travel; so I returned reconciled toward college, willing to accept training toward a middle-class career. Medicine was what I had in mind; but soon brother Joe's complaints about "irrelevant" memorization in order to pass his Pathology course, put together with a poor teacher at my freshman zoology class, threw things off that track early in the game. I was interested in world politics, history and the arts.

President Roosevelt's New Deal program was then gaining momentum in a direction (one that would benefit Ed Erickson at Sylvan). Broader horizons and new hopes began to emerge at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Just at that point however, just after my European "enlightenment", came an opportunity for summer work at Mt. Rainier with the horse-guide group - back again to a working man's environment. We carried building materials on horses, from dirt-road dead-ends to the tops of five peaks where fire lookout towers were being built. I learned to shoe and care for horses; also how to conduct tourist safaris. It was different from working with Ed Erickson because scenic woodland made it an experience that had its own special aura. This experience later became the framework for the best play I have written, in my view - HORSEPLAY, SEVEN SCENES OF A SULTRY SUMMER ON THE RANCH.

The work that summer just out of high school made me late for registration at the University, so that only one elective course was left open to enroll in: a course on Chinese Civilization, which would fulfill requirements. That course turned out to be the most cherished one, for it alone went beyond what I already had learned in high school, and it was loaded with interest and challenge. Prof. Pollard proved to be an extraordinary person; he made the material come alive, and he made it part of my world. In consequence of his course, I applied for, and was accepted as an Exchange Student scholarship to spend my sophomore college year in China - at Lingnan, the University in Canton that had been founded as Canton Christian College, where my sister Martha, her husband and children were stationed! Classes were taught in English because textbooks were in English. Then, upon return to Seattle, it seemed natural for me to add Chinese Language to my program of study. [Next, consider looking at "China Diary" Part II Ch. 10]

Another important encounter also then evolved: the University YMCA at that time had a very active student program, together with the YWCA, focusing on world affairs as well as socio-economic domestic affairs. Pacifism was prominent. Discussions, lectures and study groups (institutes) were being promoted. Because I lived at the "Y" during my junior year, and because of my foreign contacts in both Europe and Asia, these activities fed my appetites until graduation in 1938. There were even occasional arguments with young fellow travelers of the Communist Party. Those travelers always favored more direct action than the rest of us thought wise. We met together on occasion because of mutual interests in internationalism and pacifism.

Actually, my liberal bent at college had begun right at the start, when, as a freshman I joined a cooperative housing program (like a fraternity with respect to housing but without exclusivity and fraternal embellishments). A musically talented high school friend, Bob Searles, and I roomed together; in this consumer-cooperative system, each house resident performed ten hours a week of work in exchange for reduced rates. There were seven such former frat/sorority houses operating in this plan, allowing inexpensive attendance at the university because charges were based on pro-rated actual costs. It was definitely a socialistic design and it proved highly successful. During the Depression years innovations of such nature were not uncommon in that part of the country.

During the summers of l935 and 1936 I worked in Mt. Olympus National Monument (soon it became a national park) at a fire lookout and then on a trail crew that camped out. We had two horses to carry our tools and supplies; and we built several miles of trails - the four of us - blasting cliffs and building bridges, as needed. I handled the horses and did the cooking also. Each night the horses were turned loose to graze, to be rounded up on foot the next morning. One time it snowed in August and one of the horses broke its leg on a rockslide. We had no gun; so we blew its head off with two sticks of dynamite. On another occasion in the summer of 1936 I hiked at night by flashlight, after work, over a couple of ridges to a ranger station. There I learned from a hiker who had just camped there, that my brother Joe had got married on the summit of Mt. Rainier three days previous.

It impressed me that the superintendent-ranger at Mt. Olympus, who had been raised a Quaker, never used government tools to work on his government-supplied property; he bought his own tools.

At University of Washington there were opportunities to hobnob with American Orientals, capitalizing both upon some language familiarity and upon having been in China and Japan. Some strong friendships developed from that. (The valedictorian of our high school class of 500 in Tacoma, Yaeko Izaki, was Japanese; she had been in the same German class with me; and I visited her in Tokyo en route to China in 1935 - and again in 1946 after World War II.) In line with my new Asian interests I also investigated immigration from the Canton area into the US, to find that much of it was illegal and that the Immigration people couldn't find ways, at the time, to prevent fictitious persons from entering by claiming US citizenship. As evidence that it was real, I met one of the Lingnan students from our dormitory after he actually came to this country in the guise of one of those fictitious identities. At that time the Oriental Exclusion Act of 1924 precluded immigration on the grounds of race; so phony citizens alone could gain entry.

As a graduate cum laude in General Studies and new member of Phi Beta Kappa, and having focused on Chinese studies (and 'cello), I was being encouraged to proceed further with graduate work on China, aiming toward an academic career.

The fall of 1939 was the time when I began three successive years of graduate study at U. of Chicago, U. of California at Berkeley, and at Harvard. Because war seemed possible, the nation appeared to be recovering from the economic depression as Roosevelt subtly moved it forward in a stance against the Axis powers. My contacts with my friends in Austria and Germany ceased because of the war there; and in Asia as well, where the Japanese had occupied almost half of China, forcing its Nationalist government into the interior. Sister Martha's husband attempted to follow her earlier escape from Canton, and had been imprisoned by the Japanese at Stanley prison in captured Hongkong. Both areas of my interest and familiarity abroad suddenly were in the throes of disaster. In Chicago I found Western Union delivery boys bringing news of the wartime deaths of volunteers who had entered the war in Europe.

The Roosevelt administration, surreptitiously I thought, was pushing the nation toward war in Europe, and maybe even against Japan. Our "national defense" program had stepped up. It was still hoped that the Japanese offensive would fall on its face and that somehow, China's national sovereignty could be re-asserted.

Of course the situation remained like that for three and a half years more; but it intensified steadily as was attested by start of universal conscription.

In Chicago in 1938-39 I was unprepared for two things: life in a big eastern city where ugliness, deprivation and degradation revealed themselves; and the detailed, narrow focus of academic specialization at the graduate level. That narrow educational focus precluded broad investigations and big pictures; study became technological; it verged on drudgery. Nevertheless there were some stimulating courses; and on the whole Chicago proved to be the most valuable of those three first years of graduate study. That was partly because of Robert Maynard Hutchins and the Great Books. Although I did not get along well with H. Creel, the China specialist I went there to work with (not many did), he recommended me for a fellowship under the American Council of Learned Societies which was encouraging Asian studies in academia at that time. I was awarded the fellowship and it took me first to the University of California, and then to Harvard, where I became a Course Assistant, researching instructional materials and grading papers. At Chicago early Chinese history was featured; at Berkeley it had been philology of the language and Chinese history of the middle periods (200 A.D. to l,000 A.D.); then at Harvard, the period after 1,000 A.D. got emphasis. At Berkeley I also had a semester of Japanese language.

Compared to other graduate students, my ability with written Chinese was weak: I did not have a photographic memory for characters. There was one embarrassing incident at Harvard to illustrate how much I could feel like a fish out of water. The Chinese scholar Hu Shih who soon became Chinese Embassador to the USA visited Harvard on one occasion, partly in order to spend some time with another notable Chinese scholar and linguist, Chao Yuan-jen. Seeing me in the Chinese library, Dr. Hu mistook me for somebody else, perhaps a faculty member, and in his cordial chit-chat impulsively invited me to Dr. Chao's house to have supper there, telling me what a marvelous gourmet cook Mrs. Chao was. I don't know at what point he discovered his mistake, so skillfully did he smooth things over - nor do I know who the eminent intended person was who got cheated out of a gourmet repast. But when the event came about, I found myself in august company, way over my head both scholastically and in the language. Part of the entertainment consisted of trying to say things backwards, not word by word, but sound by sound. Dr. Chao was really good at it. Because of traditional Chinese courtesy and hospitality, I was not shown up to be out-of-place by these important people; but I could clearly see that I should not have accepted the invitation, knowing who his excellency was and to whose house we were going.

At all three universities I participated in their orchestras and joined pacifist and international-emphasis groups. In Berkeley I lived at International House. At Chicago I did volunteer work at a Settlement House near the stockyards.

CHAPTER 4: The War Years - 1942-46

The United States entered into war in the fall of 1941, and, though registered under the draft as a conscientious objector, I was unsure when I would be called for Civilian Public Service. My brothers and I all were conscientious objectors. The fact that we all came from a seriously religious background was apparent enough; and in my case my friendships in Europe and in the Orient reinforced a conviction that I could not bear arms. "Humanitarian grounds" the local draft board termed it. I was also a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a national pacifist organization having roots in religious doctrine.

[A personalized, detailed account of what the author was doing during the war years appears in PART II Ideology]

As a graduate in General Studies and new member of Phi Beta Kappa, having focused on Chinese studies (and 'cello). I was being encouraged to proceed further with graduate studies focused on China, aiming toward an academic career.

In Asia World War II began early. Japan's conquest of China's three northeastern provinces - Manchuria - took place in 1929 when, under Japanese military might, Manchukuo was set up as a puppet regime. Japan's bombing of parts of Shanghai followed in 1931; and "extraterritorially" disguised maneuvers and aggressive moves by Japanese troops in north China intruded against a backdrop of warlord instabilities there. I recall seeing arrogant Japanese troops push around, intimidate, and manhandle Chinese civilians at a railroad station near Tientsin in the summer of l936. Two years later they were overrunning most of northeast China. And after only two more years came the Rape of Nanking, as Japanese troops occupied most of coastal China. They drove the national government of China out of two emergency inland relocations. At the time of Pearl Harbor, Japan controlled Hongkong, Singapore, the Philippines, present-day Indonesia, and parts of Malaya and Burma. Many of these Japanese conquests were brutal and ruthless; they were oppressive, unprofitable and highly destructive. It was imperial aggression at its worst.

Then in 1939, with tension growing in Europe as its war broke out, the world's best-armed countries naturally were focusing attention upon their own front-yards. Germany, at first in Sudeten Land and in Austria, had expanded without opposition. Statecraft, backed by military strength and heavy proportions of German-speaking residents, carried those coups. Then came expansion toward Poland and Czechoslovakia by blitzkrieg, still only falteringly opposed. Finally full warfare broke out - not only in the Balkans and eastward, but also to the west in a re-play of WW I strategies, again by quick blitz in each case. Next came German overrunning of the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Denmark. These strikes, because of their brevity, introduced warfare of more concentrated type, in combination with threats; diplomacy: they afforded less exposure to protracted suffering and to gradual strangulation. It was more like selective electrocution than prolonged mass torture. In that manner it achieved its political objectives with maximum efficiency, greater economy, and higher speed. It contrasted sharply to Japan's brand of aggressive war, seeming to be less ruthless, less inhumane. That might explain how Norway, Balkan states and parts of the Middle East more readily succumbed to German "diplomacy". Russia likewise - until Germany aggressively turned the tables against Russia as the new decade began.

Some factions in the USA thought that Berlin might become the present day counterpart of ancient Rome - political overlord of Europe: that European unification might benefit from German thoroughness and efficiency, while benefiting also from her technological know-how. But of course the other, dominant faction in the US regarded the Rome-Tokyo-Berlin Axis as wholly irreconcilable with democratic free-enterprise; it was totalitarian and hence was a danger to humanitarian social progress on the world scene.

So, how were things in the USA? For most of l942-3, USA was just gearing up. Meanwhile we bolstered Great Britain as best we could; we fought against submarines and we protected merchant ships in the Atlantic. Our military actions, however, mainly consisted of harassment and containment when and where possible without too great costs. For instance, no attempts were made to liberate Norway or Denmark. Not until 1944 were adequate preparations completed for the big strike, for the coup against the Reich and Italy - and with gradual pursuit of the Japanese Navy in the Pacific. In all of this, China had received little more than token attention: too far away; too impossible; too costly; strategically less urgent.

Regarding the war in Asia, I felt that China, because of it vastness and dense population, and because of its underdeveloped modernization, would survive Japan's occupation, and that Japan would have to pull back, even if left to her own devices. As for the European war, it seemed that Germany might bring about centralization and diminish the nationalistic enmities that seemed to breed wars in Europe. In order to achieve that role, German imperialism would have to backtrack. As I saw it, such eventualities would come through diplomacy and adjudication - through peaceful means - rather than through drastic, destructive warfare.

In view of what has just been said, we can readily understand how the war's impact upon Americans was being felt. War casualties, until 1944, were sparse and were widely scattered. The sense was that the war was less a matter of combat or peril than a spurt of industrial and economic rejuvenation that engaged the whole country. Many persons were being relocated arbitrarily but with a sense of inevitability and pride; many were finding relationship being broken up - some to their grief and others to their relief. The atmosphere was exciting: it was like competing in a race, or the thrill of playing a game for high stakes. What unexpected situation would arise next? There was also purpose. Commitment. Sacrifice. Drama. Importance. Responsibility. Advancement. Suspense. Nobility. This was all very different from the Depression, at last.

So the heavy casualties and costs did not begin to sink in until the summer of 1944, and even the cleanup in the Pacific in 1945 seemed anti-climactic. Ironically, problems of refugees and the homeless and of reconstruction in Europe coincided with important naval battles in the Pacific and the atom bombs' fiery Armageddon. To put it cynically, "toast the Japs but rescue the Europeans". Incidentally, when I looked up Yaeko Izaki again in Tokyo in the summer of 1946 on my way to China, her father's Christian church had been wiped out, and the family was celebrating her brother's return from maritime service amid ramshackle surroundings. They were sharing a single festive, rare, salted cucumber.

Except for some dietary shortages and rationed items, and except for reduced mobility because of gasoline rationing, Americans had prospered during the war years. Then we shared that prosperity, rebuilding devastated Europe. [Other details pertaining to my activities during the war years appear in PART II, Chapter 13 Ideology –Motivation]

CHAPTER 5. UNRRA and the Foreign Service Institute

When release from the draft came in February of 1946, two prospects opened up because of my specialization on China and familiarity with the language, and because of my interest in relief and reconstruction work there. Both opportunities involved moving to Washington, D.C,: first to work for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency, then five months later, for the Department of State on a special assignment in China.

The UNRRA job was only part-time and temporary. It involved serving as a housing receptionist at a D.C. facility for new employees about to go abroad in service - technicians, experts, specialists - many of them to China. Somebody thought that my previous preparation for medical relief work in China might make this a compatible and useful work situation - and it was. Some of the workers seemed to me rather unreliable and eccentric, ill-prepared for what they would encounter; but others looked like promising bets. There was a peculiar blending of opportunists on one hand and dedicated idealists on the other.

After several months a call came from the Department of State's Foreign Service Institute which operates training programs that prepare Foreign Service officers for what they might encounter in their foreign assignments. Henry L. Smith, who had been conducting a national radio program regarding regional dialects (listening to people talk as he interviewed them, then as a Linguist pinpointing where they had been raised), was in charge of the Languages Section. Was I interested in going to Beijing to conduct a new Chinese language/culture training program there? Six young Foreign Service officers had been hand-picked to do nothing else for two years other than to absorb this training. The U.S. military had previously operated a similar program there for certain intelligence officers, doing so partly in connection with a commercial Language School. Now that the war was over, some help or pointers might be available to me from remnants of that earlier program - if such could be found.

As it turned out, one of the Foreign Service officers who had been chosen for this new program, Ralph Clough, had also spent a year at Lingnan University as an Exchange student, also from the University of Washington, during the year after I had been there. (It had later proved to be the final year of such exchanges because of the Japanese invasion, 1937.) That was a happy discovery because Ralph and I had hobnobbed considerably in the past. Our new training program itself was to be supervised by the acting U.S. Consul in Beijing, Fulton (Tony) Freeman. Tony had been an exchange student at Lingnan the year before me and had distinguished himself for his facility in learning Cantonese, the local dialect. So it was an ideal situation for me.

Tony arranged for office and work space on one edge of the Embassy compound across the street from the French Hotel; it was behind a Peking wall gate that now has been torn down so as to enlarge Tienanmen Square. I set about hiring six native Chinese tutors, none of whom allegedly could, or would, speak English. Three of them were old-style gents who wore gowns, and three were younger men who wore western clothes. The regimen of instruction was for each tutor to spend time daily with each foreign student, principally working on language. Instruction in the cultural aspect would be done in occasional group meetings; but most of it would occur through osmosis in the course of interaction between the students and their tutors. All of this had to be arranged in Chinese, using Chinese materials such as I could devise or find.

By luck I found some paperback Civics textbooks in Chinese for middle school level at a local bookstore, and their vocabulary was particularly well suited to our students' needs. Next came Chinese school textbooks on economics and history.

Although priority transportation via US Air Force had been arranged and allowed me to take along a great many personal items, Chinese language textbooks and reference works were not included, presumably because it was thought they would be readily available on the scene. But they weren't, partly because of war's aftermath. That meant scrounging, and devising.

Tony found a place for me to live - a walled one-floor residence that occupying Japanese military officers had commandeered when they ejected an American Standard Oil representative several years before. Technically it was to revert to S. O. at a suitable point. (Now it has been swallowed up by the largest government-operated department store in Beijing.) It was located on an alley (hutung) just off the main business street. U.S. Marine drivers ferried me each day between that residence and work at the edge of the U.S. Embassy. They took delight in scaring "the kooks" by threatening to run them down; it was a process that was onerous to me because it looked like an echo of foreign imperialism and implied Western cultural arrogance. It was part of the post-war situation.

Tony also lined up for me a man-servant/cook/housekeeper and his wife, cheerful, stocky peasant types, who did the shopping and kept me informed about neighborhood situations. That included offering unsolicited information regarding the refugee Germans who lived about a block away, presumed to be of interest to me because they were former Caucasian enemies of mine. This housing unit included a gigantic bathtub with built-in water heater such as the Japanese find indispensable.

U.S. Marines guarded the Embassy compound, which housed very many buildings and extended for the equivalent of about four blocks by two blocks. Most of the marines were young recruits who, having arrived too late to for combat action or excitement, usually set about trying to create their own - which lamentably often included plaguing or exploiting native Chinese "kooks". As I saw it, they were undermining the war's lofty objectives.

It was nevertheless inescapable that Americans were the new top dogs: we had the real, hard money and we offered security. We had displaced the Japanese; we had bombed hell out of their islands and made them kowtow; we had a corner on the world's goodies. Whatever deference and debt the Chinese owed, we were its recipients; and we also guarded the path to survival, away from defeat and disaster. So we were privileged, cultivated, protected and nurtured; pampered; but we were also targets for petitions and favors.

One such petition struck me as out-of-the-ordinary: through my servant I was told about a certain Chinese composer of classical music who wished to present me the score of a symphony he had composed. Actually, it turned out that the score was not for me personally, but hopefully for a world audience - if I could take or send it for performance in America. The composer, originally a Chinese from Formosa (Taiwan) now in Beijing, wanted to visit me with this score. Now it happened that I had a phonograph from military surplus and some long-play recordings of classical music from the Armed Services radio network. I knew that this musician might like to listen to them. So I invited him to come to dinner. Later I learned that he had hocked most of his personal belongings in order to dress suitably for this event, that he had not eaten anything for several days beforehand - also that he had suffered gastric upsets for several days after eating an unaccustomed large meal at my place.

Jiang Wen-yeh (Japanese name Ko Bunya) had written the tune for the Japanese national anthem. The symphonic score he brought with him was "Springtime in Peking". He revealed, without pathos, that the Japanese had turned against him because he was an ethnic Chinese, and the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party now restored to power in China) rejected him because of his Japanese connections. And I could see that he would be rejected next by the Chinese Communists because of his Japanese connections and his being a native of Taiwan, as well.

Jiang listened intently to one of my armed forces records (they were unlabeled and lacked verbal identification as well) and said he felt sure this must be Shostakovich's new Sixth Symphony, which he was delighted to hear for the first time. We listened to two others; then he said he had to leave, but he hoped I would be able to find some conductor and orchestra in America that would give his work a hearing. Later I sent it to Leopold Stokowski, who, after a long delay wrote that he would perform one of its movements if I had the instrumental parts available. Unfortunately I did not have them, and at the that time I could not afford the expense of having parts copied from the manuscript. Two other conductors, Sergiu Commissiona and Robert Gerle, also have commended the score; but I still have it, and nobody but Mr. Jiang has ever heard it, so far as I know; and Jiang heard it only in his own head.

In Beijing I tried, briefly, to find direct traces of my father's five-year medical work, without success. The city was truly run down because of wartime abuse and neglect, but the Imperial City was still glorious, as were many of the capital's other famous landmarks. It was not safe to travel outside of the city because the countryside had been infiltrated by Communist commandos, whose eventual aim was taking the walled city itself.

Residents were pressed by staggering inflation: you paid for things in wads of almost worthless bill of enormous denomination. That hardship was imposed upon an already existing poverty; for many of the residents had sold most of their household heirlooms and possessions, or were trying to do so. Physical ruin was not apparent so much as low morale and resignation: how bad were things going to get with no end in sight!? A prevalent expression, those days, was "Mei-yu fa-tze" (there's no way out). The presence of US Marines on the trains was their only guarantee of getting through; and US airplanes seemed to bring in the only commerce that took place.

But there were operas and plays - in unheated buildings. I would return home with frigid feet that refused to warm up. Electricity, available only at 200 volts from limited outlets, was weak; and black-outs rotated through different sections of the city each night randomly for a couple of hours at a time, in an effort to ration whatever could be coaxed out of run-down, near-obsolete facilities.

The Embassy had phones, but the network was as weak as those we had back home in the 1920's, but compounded by other weird malfunctions.

The instructional program was working out well. Although one of the six, Jim Speer, asked for a change of duty after about four months, the five Foreign Service officers who remained became highly competent with both spoken and written colloquial Chinese within their first year. Besides Ralph Clough, they were Bob Rinden the only bachelor, Ed Martin, Larry Lutkins, and Alfred Jenkins. Their tutors were delighted; they loved their jobs. It was a pity that the Communist take-over seemed to be closing in on Beijing.

On one occasion I took the train down to Tientsin, to shepherd a shipment of personal household goods that was arriving by slow freight for two of the students' houses. (The four who were married had brought their wives with them.) Armed Marines were aboard the train and they tried their luck with pot-shots at farmers along the route. Then, as if to make up for it, whenever the train stopped, which was frequently, as children descended upon the train with open hands, they gave out gum, candy and cigarettes, with apparent generosity but also to see the kids scramble and grovel. It appeared to be standard practice.

At the warehouse in Tientsin on the Marines' compound, the freight boxes already had been broken into, and several items removed (turned out to have been mainly liquor).

Consequently I went to the Commandant to complain and ask for an investigation. He made note of the facts and suggested that I return a little later. As I left his headquarters and started looking around, I was approached by two marines, one of whom said, "Whatcha doin' here - snoopin' around?" And with that he punched me in the eye, drawing blood via a laceration from impact of something metallic in his hand. An attendant at the Marine infirmary stitched it, without anesthetic, of course. Then the commandant lined up a couple of platoons of Marines and asked me to identify the two who had accosted me. I couldn't - not for sure; in fact maybe it wouldn't have been safe to do so, anyway. Conduct by Marines in China stood in sharp contrast to its high quality and the excellent morale of military personnel that I had seen in MacArthur's Japan.

The Air Force C-47 flight that had carried me from Washington to Beijing had stopped over in Japan for a day after island-hopping across the Pacific - via Hawaii, Midway (which was only a narrow landing strip out in the middle of the vast ocean), Guam and Okinawa. In Tokyo I ran into General MacArthur outside an elevator in his Headquarters. The scope of devastation in Japan was, of course, no surprise. The thoughtful and somber mood of the Japanese and their deferential, almost worshipful and compliant attitudes toward the occupiers of their country, fascinated me. This attitude contrasted so sharply with what I had seen in Japan just before the war when they were ebullient, energetic, and bristling with a sense of destiny and self-assurance.

CHAPTER 6: An Unforgettable Adventure

To return to Beijing, in the winter of 1947 there occurred an unexpected adventure that involved further air travel. I had been hoping for an opportunity to revisit Canton in south China now that ten years and a war had passed since I had spent a year there. Tony knew about my wish and remembered. When the US Ambassador to the Philippines came to Beijing on an official visit in his assigned personal Air Force C-47 and Tony heard that the Ambassador intended next to stop in Nanking and Canton en route back to his post, Tony arranged that I go along for the ride. I would return from Canton to Beijing by commercial airline. It would mean taking a week of vacation.

The Ambassador was friendly - and inquisitive about our program. His entourage consisted of not more than four or five. We flew over the Great Wall on a slight detour, just be sure it was still there, and then headed south. It was striking to see how green the land was around the larger cities and towns where human night-soil abundantly fertilized growing things. Green-ness diminished non-linearly as each successive larger diameter of added distance from each center of habitation. And how numerous were the small villages! Yet oddly, I thought, there were no people, no carts, to be seen on the roads. That was because aircraft in the skies were, often as not, Nationalist warplanes with bombs seeking out Communist guerrillas. Were all of the tens of thousands of people we were not seeing, and who were hiding, Communist sympathizers, or guerrillas? If not, how were they able to, or would they want to hide manifestations of life as seen from the air?

The Nanking stop-over, just at lunchtime, turned out to involve only airport formalities for the Ambassador. I did not leave the plane, and half an hour later we were again airborne, again unavoidably terrorizing large segments of the countryside - that was, until we encountered heavy clouds and ascended above them. It turned out that with bad weather below, both at and Hongkong, we would bypass the rest of China and fly directly to Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines.

It would take some extraordinary good luck for me to see Canton now, let alone return to Beijing!

At the Philippines the sky was clear, however: we could see the half-sunken hulks of many ships that had had been destroyed in the Allied attack on Manila harbor. Seen from the air, wartime desolation and destruction appeared far worse than in China: it was like Japan again.

At Clark Air Force Base the Ambassador and his retinue quickly disappeared and I was left alone to fend for myself. Since I was a white man and had official credentials and connections, I was free to roam around; nobody challenged me. Eventually I found a notice board that posted flight-departures. Way down the list, a C-46 with destination Canton was slated to depart the next day. It belonged to the aviation company that General Chennault had just formed. It was surplus property and was being ferried to China for use by China Aviation. Asking around, I located its radio operator, apparently the only crew member then on the base. After hearing a description of my plight, he said that I would need the permission of Chennault himself in order to hitch a ride. He added that the airline's manager happened to be in Manila at the moment, and maybe permission might be obtained through him. We got him on the phone. Sounding somewhat reluctant, he said o.k., but that was only after I offered to contact somebody in the U.S. Embassy as a reference. Shortly afterward the plane's pilot and navigator appeared, and the radioman told them I would be joining them the next day.

"Huh-uh," grunted the pilot, "not on your life".

"We just talked to Whitey Willauer," I insisted, "and he said it was o.k."

"Willauer huh? In Shanghai?"

"No; he's here; we just talked to him."

"Give me his number; I want to talk to him," he said to the radioman. That was done, and a lengthy phone conversation ensued.

Then the pilot said, "Willauer says you can come - tomorrow morning at ten." But he was clearly unhappy about the matter.

There was a small food-bar restaurant in the hanger, but there were no overnight accommodations. I had no local currency and no knowledge about where to go or how to get there. So I spent the night at the Base's infirmary on a gurney.

In the morning I was awakened at seven a.m. by the radio operator. "You still gonna go? Well, you gotta shake a leg then, because we're about ready for takeoff."

Indeed so. Engines were already revving. The radioman had come back for me when he realized they were intending to leave me behind - as if having forgotten about me. But as it turned out, they were remembering only too well.

This C-46 had seen better days: it was noisy; it creaked. There weren't any seats, even bucket seats, and there was a sizeable cargo of what appeared to be airplane parts in wooden crates. It occurred to me that perhaps the pilot had considered the plane overloaded even without an extra passenger.

After a couple of hours, we were nearing the China coast. There was rain in the clouds below us. The air was very bumpy. Unable to make radio contact with Canton in order to get them to turn on their beacon so as to assist us in making an instrument landing, the pilot seemed suddenly nervous. "We'll have to consider landing at Hongkong," the navigator suggested.

"Not in this weather. Not Kai Duk," the pilot said. Nevertheless he began circling in a holding pattern around the Hongkong beacon. "Maybe this overcast will break up," he muttered. Hongkong clearly was a last-ditch choice, with fuel running out, yet he ignored all recommendations from others that we land there. At one point he offered this salient explanation: "we got no clearance to land in Hongkong." To have landed there would have involved immigration, customs clearance, and possibly inspection or investigation.

So we flew back to Canton to see whether the weather had improved or whether radio assistance could help us to land there. Fortunately a small break in the cloud cover enabled us to descend to about 500 feet above the terrain, and the pilot was able to find his way to the tiny dirt landing strip he was seeking. The C-46 was met by a group of about nine persons despite the rain. Two of them were Occidentals, a man and a woman, employees of the air company, stationed at Canton. There were some technician-working-men figures, and inexplicably about four military men in Nationalist uniforms, apparently officers. All of them immediately boarded the plane with a direct interest in its cargo, but also to get out of the rain. I accompanied the Occidentals into their office building. They had not expected me and were immediately curious. They had many questions, particularly about what had been said in the phone conversations with Whitey Willauer, and listened intently to my briefing. I then discovered that this was not Canton's only airport. They expressed surprise that Willauer had o.k.'d my trip. My contacts with China and my previous interests in China seemed to interest them uncommonly. In their solicitous hospitality they offered to take me to the Lingnan campus.

The campus itself was little changed, though it seemed deserted, and some of the buildings needed refurbishing. Nobody was around who had been acquainted with the old days. Appearing to be in limbo, somehow it didn't even seem to evoke nostalgia.

I picked up a ride into Canton, which also seemed run down and deserted, (why was the Pearl River devoid of the thousands of sampans who used to be so thick as to almost close up the river itself?) At the commercial airport I was able to buy a seat on a plane back to Beijing. When the flight crew, composed of ex-American G.I.s, learned that I held a single-engine pilots license, they invited me into the cockpit, and after a while I was at the controls flying this commercial airliner in a manner that would have been impossible in the USA - or maybe anywhere. On a couple of occasions when the cockpit curtain was pushed aside, I could look back and see the long-suffering Chinese passengers unaware of the hazard to which they were currently being made victims. Some of them had already become airsick despite their ignorance of what was going on at the ship's helm. Yet fear is usually a component of motion sickness....

Two months later a small item appeared on the front page of the English language Shanghai paper. It said that so-and-so, a pilot on the new airline, had used a C-46 to smuggle arms to the Chinese Communists. Evidently that had been my free ride to Canton. But perhaps my adventure had been merely a practice run; nevertheless I thought it convincing enough to be the main event.

In the summer of 1947 when left Beijing, the NW Airlines flight stopped at the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, then at Onalaska, at Anchorage, and then Winnepeg. In Beijing the Chinese tutors had presented scrolls and a silver incense burner inscribed with a tribute and their names, in farewell. And, once back in the US, I wrote a piece about how the Communists were to take over, and how little hope there seemed to be for the Nationalists ever to re-establish a government over a united China. The piece appeared at a time when, out of political and ideological motives, the "loss" of China was about to be blamed on liberals in the State Department and left-wing pinkies. The editor of The Washington Post, which printed it as feature article in a Sunday edition, told me that Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Walter Lippman each told him it was the best thing they had seen regarding the contemporary situation in China. Two other articles also appeared in academic journals, one describing the Beijing training program we had conducted, and the other those curriculum materials that had evolved through it. As the Communists took over China, that program moved to Taiwan and it was taken over by Howard Sollenberger who had been raised in China the son of missionaries and whom I had recommended.

CHAPTER 7. Academia

In view of the post-war China experience, it seemed sensible to return to graduate school to get degrees and then go into teaching. Besides, a degree likewise might bring other possibilities within range. In the summer of 1949, partly because the China experience had been deemed successful, I was readmitted to Graduate School at Harvard under its new Regional Studies Program, China naturally being that region. It afforded renewed association with Prof. John Fairbank and Ben Schwartz who was soon to become my Ph.D. thesis advisor. Edwin Reischauer who had taught one of my courses earlier - on Tang Dynasty written Chinese - was then with the State Department, and very shortly he became US Ambassador to Japan.

A coterie of about a dozen students of Chinese affairs who had benefited from being on the scene either during or right after the war at varying levels of experience, were eager grad students; so there was plenty of stimulus for discussion and research. Many had studied Chinese while in military service; and we were joined by a similar group of Japan specialists. It was in 1949 that the Communist regime took over all of China, save Taiwan. The bamboo curtain of China's isolation and changed ideology began to cut us off from contemporary contacts and information; but that made it easier for us to concentrate on history and cultural analysis. For my Ph. D. thesis topic I chose "The Anti-imperialist Theme in Chinese Nationalism - 1919-1926" because it seemed that the Chinese Communists had played a significant part in determining the nature of Chinese ideology in that period. Just after that, in 1927, Chiang Kai-shek suddenly left their fold and turned against them as he took over leadership of the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party). So 1927 had been the time when Communists were hunted down and killed. The fields of examination for my doctoral degree were Chinese Language, Chinese History, Russian History, and Social Anthropology. Reading knowledge of French and German also had been required.

How does a person without a fellowship or grant finance graduate study of this nature? Part-time work is part of it. Answering a notice asking for some aviation experience, I happened to team up with a novel enterprise just off campus. The Educational Research Corporation proved to be an association of professors who contracted their expertise mainly to the government for special projects. Through their academic reputations at Harvard, Tufts and M.I.T. they had first-hand connections with the feds and the Defense Department. Automation of training aids for naval and aviation use was one of their babies. They had just received a contract from the Civil Aeronautics Administration to research the validity of current requirements for keeping licensed instrument pilots (blind flying) competent. So they wanted somebody to sit in the back seat of their Navion airplane and check off what happened while various pilots flew the test course. The airplane was equipped with an amber windshield and side windows, and the pilot being tested would wear blue goggles. The combination of blue and amber blocked off his view of anything outside of the airplane, yet the safety pilot and I could see everything through the blue covering over the windows.

Arrangements had been made with airport towers for their cooperation in simulating an instrument landing for our plane - if it made it. Well, we flew from different local airports, and about two-thirds of our pilots did o.k; the other third.... well, we always stopped them in order to save ourselves, the safety pilot and me. Of course the end-result was an overhaul of requirements for additional flight hours in order to keep certifications valid. These were not commercial pilots we were testing. They were sometime pilots, charter pilots, private parties or executives who enjoyed flying themselves around.

An Education professor at Harvard was the man in charge at Educational Research Corp., P. J. Rulon, and his specialty was crunching data and filing reports. His permanent staff consisted of a secretary, an accountant, and a part-time attorney to monitor contracts. Specialists were hired by the job, as needed. After the instrument flight project ended, he put me to work on another project for CAA (now FAA). It was to design a more intelligible alphabet code for radio use in aviation and to slant it toward international use. "Able, Baker, Charlie" had been the military code, but quite a few of the letters sounded alike or failed to be understood. The UN's International Civil Aviation Organization, in Montreal, was to be involved. I devised acoustical tests, tried them out of various speakers and listeners, wrote up a report and recommended a new code which ultimately came out with the current "Alpha, Bravo" designations. Then we went to Montreal (P.J. for the ride and food, mainly) only to discover that politics rather than intelligibility was to determine the new code. The committee at ICAO was loaded with French- and Spanish-speaking bureaucrats who had absorbed very little from our report, but who wanted words they knew were familiar to speakers of romance languages (which languages are in truth, generically, the least distinctive of individual speech sounds. Anyway, as Rulon had promised, the food was good, the city interesting, and the atmosphere exotic.

After that, and based upon our international "success", we undertook a "Design for an International Language for Radiotelephone Communications in Aviation", which by intention and for genuine practical considerations, proved to be English. But various specific words were enjoined because they would not prove audible enough or clear or distinctive enough. At that point the project was dropped by the CAA. [See the APPENDIX for a follow-up to the above]

Between 1949 and 1952, during my studies, MacCarthy-ism emerged and grew. Under special attack were State Department employees and in particular its China specialists. Owen Lattimore especially, and, by their association with him, John Fairbank and certain other academicians. Within State and its Foreign Service those who knew China first-hand ducked for cover if possible - being highly vulnerable to scrutiny or assault. With but one or two exceptions, the young officers from our Beijing program took other foreign assignments so as to get out of the line of fire. Several brilliant and gifted careers were ruined as a result of unfounded suspicions or outright condemnations on the floors of the Congress and which the press magnified.

Would that, or did it, affect job chances for a person acquainted with and knowledgeable about China? Well, yes; it was a very tight job market. MacCarthyism cut off various government jobs because of suspicions by innuendo. But I did get a part-time temporary job for two years teaching a graduate seminar and advising a thesis writer at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. Meanwhile I also took a full-time job at Drew University in New Jersey, teaching International Relations and Oriental History. It was a job that paid only $7,000 for nine months, and it was not an easy one.

Early in 1950 Betty Miller and I got married. She was a nurse and worked at Massachusetts General Hospital. After our son Stephen was born in February 1951, David followed in 1952. It began to appear that I could not support this family with only a teaching career; moreover Drew University wanted to drop its experiment with Asian studies at a small institution. I became a Technical Writer at Bendix Aviation. It paid adequately, was interesting and challenging; and working with engineers on matters related to aviation, about which I had some first-hand knowledge, was satisfying. I was at Bendix for three and a half years.

CHAPTER 8: The Mature Years

In 1959 I moved to Baltimore because of a family emergency involving Stephen and David. By that time MacCarthy-ism was no longer a great issue, though FBI men were still screening prospective federal employees by interviewing people who knew them, or who had associated with these subject persons. At the University of Maryland campus in College Park I went to see if I could teach about China in their well-established program. It so happened that they had just hired somebody in their on-campus program there. But there was an off-campus evening program there also, which I was able to join two years later, for about six years. In the course of my initial interview at College Park it came out that I had been working with engineers. Would I be interested in an opening for an administrative assistant in the Physics Department?

I took it, and it suited me to a "T". So I pursued it for the next 19 years as my major daytime work.

The Department of Physics, which added "and Astronomy" to its title just three years after I joined it, in 1959 had consisted of only nine full-time faculty members, all but two of them quite young. The Chairman, John S. Toll, a Princeton Ph.D. physicist, was dynamic, resourceful, silver-tongued, ambitious, dedicated, principled, and enormously tactful and considerate.

He was busily recruiting talented new faculty members, because he had realized how to make use of federal funding connected with, or spurred by Defense technology. We were conveniently located in the suburbs of the nation's capital; so John Toll capitalized upon that. Within the next six years the faculty grew to 40 instructional members and another 35 research-only members; the number of graduate students increased to 320; four new buildings and a cyclotron were added, funding for its research programs grew to millions of dollar per year. When I left the campus, retiring at age 62, Dr. Toll had become President of the University itself. When I had first begun however, 19 years earlier, I had found a mattress and some bedding in the attic of the main building. Suspecting it was being used illicitly and possibly immorally, possibly for profit, by a graduate student or students, I had disposed of it - only for find out later that it was Prof. Toll's overnight emergency snooze spot. He never said a word to me about its disappearance even though one of the other staff members told him what had been done with his missing bed.

My job involved setting up the class schedules and teaching assignments; trouble-shooting with respect to faculty members' needs; supervising recruitment of graduate students; monitoring their welfare (about one third of them came from foreign countries); publicizing the Department's programs; representing the Department at various meetings; handling parking permits; smoothing public relations when possible; taking phone calls of all sorts; facilitating travel; also facilitating various interdepartmental arrangements; hiring secretaries and some other employees. I truly enjoyed contacts with faculty, staff and students and could feel that my job was appreciated.

By observing John Toll I learned several cardinal precepts of administrative technique: never take sides openly. Say nothing derogatory that might be quoted. Talk with and listen to dissidents all night, if that is what they think they want. Always do your home work first and don't try to improvise on the spot. Be gracious and polite consistently, no matter how busy things get. Be kind toward inherent handicaps. With troublemakers, don't forget to voice their troubles for them. Look for factors or reasons that support your position that may have eluded your adversaries. When dog-work is required, set a good example yourself. Take and use whatever you get, and be thankful for it. Learn how to change the subject gracefully, or how to modify it even though at first that might appear to prolong it.

Taking advantage of a free-tuition provision for university employees in 1967, I took up first-year law school in the evenings. It didn't go too well - didn't match my temperament, and maybe perhaps I was not young enough. I had hoped it would enlighten me regarding custody problems within the family, and that it possibly might help with special kinds of administrative matters connected with the legal codes or with governmental procedures. In both respects the law-school stint proved disappointing.

In 1967 my colon cancer was removed by successful surgery. That involved a ten-day interruption at work. Several faculty members traveled to Baltimore to the hospital. Dr. Robert Buxton, Chief of Surgery at the Medical School, who had removed nine inches of the colon and reconnected it, charged neither me nor any other source for his services in the case. I thought he did so as a matter of interdepartmental professional courtesy; but apparently he did it often, on principle, as part of his professional calling. While on vacation in Yugoslavia the following summer he was killed in a vehicle accident.

Student agitation sparked by the Vietnam war came early in the 1970's. Howard Laster had succeeded John Toll who then had become President of New York University at Stony Brook, with Howard becoming Department Chairman and very capably meeting emergencies that arose at College Park, MD. Unfortunately the aftermath of the student demonstrations was not favorable; and academi