January 31, 2018--Mr. Ludwig

For decades I have been attempting unsuccessfully to locate my 7th grade teacher, Mr. Ludwig. I was a student in his English class at PS 244 in Brooklyn in 1950, nearly 70 years ago.

More than any other teacher, in fact more than almost any other person, he changed the course of my life.

From time to time I googled him but to no avail.

But then on Friday there was his obituary in the New York Times. 

I knew more about Mr. Ludwig than was usual (it was rare in that era to know even a teacher's' first name) as he shared stories from his life, which I soaked up, seeking models of adulthood to emulate. 

Obituary from the New York Times-- 

Bert R. Ludwig was born July 25, 1920, passed away January 25, 2018. He was predeceased by his adored wife Phyllis of 60 years and his brother Bob. He is survived by his sister-in-law Claire and brother-in-law Paul and nieces Joan and Karen and their husbands Warren and Jay and their children and grandchildren.  

Bert graduated from Columbia University where he was accepted at age 14. He was extremely bright and talented. He sang and played the violin, accompanied by his brother on the piano. They played many gigs together in the Borscht Belt.  

Bert was a lieutenant in the United States Coast Guard during World War II. He was the Chief Communications Officer on a flotilla of LC1 Landing Craft during the invasion of Normandy, Omaha Beach and Utah Beach on June 6, 1944. He was also in the North African Campaign and the invasion of Sicily and Salerno.  

After the war Bert was honorably discharged and he worked for the FBI; but finally decided that education was his first love. He became a teacher, Assistant Principal and principal for the New York City school system. Bert and Phyllis enjoyed 40 wonderful summers in their home in Montauk, Long Island where they entertained their many friends and relatives. 

They loved living in Manhattan and were true New Yorkers enjoying all that Manhattan had to offer. They will be missed by those of us who knew and loved them. 

Part of Mr. Ludwig's appeal was that he was so culturally different from my father that it is fair to say he became a surrogate for me. 

He was the kind of man I was wanting to become--adventurous; worldly; heroic; well read; emotionally expressive; playful; though soft, a "real man" with a touch of class. And since most of my classmates and I who came under his spell had one or more immigrant parents ("old fashioned" was the way I thought about that), he was fully American and thus doubly attractive.

He not only taught English but also coached the school's basketball and softball teams. So I had academic lessons from him during the day and life lessons after school in the gym or on the baseball diamond.

He told us about his service in the Second World War and how he had been part of the D-Day landing. He shared dramatic photos of himself and his comrades storming Omaha Beach.

And he told us that before becoming a teacher he had been an FBI agent and recounted vivid stories about his training and some of the cases on which he worked. This was very different from what I heard at home from my father and uncles, which was either criticism or silence.

I entered his class as a virtual non-reader. I am embarrassed to admit I had more interest in Batman and Superman comics than Two Years Before the Mast. To motivate those of us lagging behind in our cultural education he created a chart on which our names were listed in alphabetical order--with me thus at the exposed bottom of the list--on which he would paste a star for every book we checked out of the library and read to completion.

While many of my classmates quickly filled the chart with enough stars to rival those in the Hayden Planetarium, I was the only one who remained starless.  Then one morning, when I arrived at his classroom and slid into my chair, on top of my desk was a new, non-library book of Sherlock Holmes stories. Puzzled, I looked toward Mr. Ludwig, who with nods and winks gestured that there was no mistake, the book was for me. Not just to read but to read and then keep.

I slipped it surreptitiously (a word he taught us) into my schoolbag and once back home put it on the shelf above the table on which I did my homework. It sat there untouched for more than two weeks until, feeling guilty and pressured, I finally picked it up and read the first story, "The Hound of the Baskervilles," and then, swept along by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's narrative magic, I read a second and after that a third. 

I stayed up all night reading the book, hiding excitedly under my blanket with the pages illuminated by my Boy Scout flashlight. 

I hid beneath the covers because to my father, reading books led to men becoming effeminate and after that . . . they would turn into men like his brother Ben, who lived a closeted life surrounded by stacks of magazines and books.

In school the next day, with Mr. Ludwig standing by the chart with his box of stars at the ready, when he asked if any of us had completed a new book, after the usual two girls waved their raised hands to report that they had finished Little Women, avoiding eye contact, in a whisper I revealed that I had finally read something other than a comic book.

Without fuss or comment, Mr. Ludwig affixed a star next to my name. And after that, through the rest of the school year I not only filled my space but my personal firmament of stars spilled over to occupy the unallocated space below my name.

I devoured anything by O'Henry or Robert Louis Stevenson or Richard Henry Dana, Mark Twain, and of course more, always more Sherlock Holmes. 

To this day,  I am an voracious reader with a personal library of read books numbering in the thousands, filling every available shelf I can fit on our crowded walls.

In 1950 I also was a non-writer. As a poor speller I was inhibited when I needed to complete written assignments. Noting this, early in the term, Mr. Ludwig asked me to remain in class after the bell.  Knowing how I admired him, he told me that Winston Churchill, when he was a young student, also could not write because of spelling problems. "And," he said, "look how well he now writes. What you need to do is just to write, to let the words flow and worry about the spelling later. That's what editors are for--to correct your grammer and speling."

He continued, "And don't forget that Einstein also had problems as a boy with both reading and writing. Not that you're a Churchill or an Einstein," he winked with a smile--he wanted to make sure I wouldn't become too full of myself, "But you can do better."

And I did: Later in life I wrote and published widely. I am the author of dozens of articles and stories and five books. All traceable to the affect Mr. Ludwig had on me at that delicate time.

Then there was what to do about my graceless, overgrown body. At the tender age of 12, I was already six-feet-five inches tall. I had fears I would grow until the only hope for me would be to join the bearded lady in the circus.

But as PS 244's basketball coach, Mr. Ludwig saw past my slumping posture and awkwardness, instead sensing the makings of a potential center for the school's basketball team. 

To help me become viable as the possible pivot for the Rugby Rockets, in those days a team's tallest player would position himself directly under the basket where he would hopefully block a few shots, do some rebounding, and score some easy layups, Mr. Ludwig spent long afternoon hours encouraging me (he believed in my potential more than I) and teaching me the moves I would need to excel in inter-school competition.

Somehow, after a few months in the gym I literally stood taller, had filled out a bit, and became one of the team's most reliable scorers. The Rockets then, with a team made up of players more talented than I, became perennial challengers for the Brooklyn borough championship. 

And finally, there was my singing. Or rather, my inability to carry a tune.

When Mr. Ludwig had the class prepare a musical "production" for PS 244's annual showcase, he had two pieces of advice, which to this day, metaphorically, have stood me in good stead--If you can't carry a tune, move your lips, lip-sync. In other words, if you are unable do something well, pretend you can. 

And, seek a role, if necessary--more metaphors--that lets you, if necessary, lay low. In this case behind a scrim lit-from-behind, as he had me do when one year's show was about tribal South Africa where I, again the overgrown me, stomped behind a suspended bed sheet so that only my attenuated shadow was projected to the audience while the rest of the class, in harmony, sang--

See him there,
The Zulu warrior.
See him there,
The Zulu chief, chief, chief, chief.

Mr Ludwig found a way to transform this frog into a prince of a chief!

For me, that is his legacy. Helping me aquire the skills and confidence to become anything my talents and hard work would permit.

For decades I have been searching for him to thank him with words that I, as an adult, finally acquired.

I failed to find him until now when I read he had died and that his funeral service last Sunday would be in New York City.

I went, hoping I would be welcome at what I suspected would be an intimate family affair. Though I was the only former student able to attend, I felt I was there representing the many others upon whom Mr. Ludwig had had such a profound effect.

I also realized I had been searching for him in all the wrong places. 

He was closer to me than I had imagined. I didn't need the Internet or Google to locate him. He had always been close at hand. Right here, within me, where has has been since 1950 and will be until I finally join him.

March 9, 2015--Bending Time

Twice a year we have our own little experience with Einstein's Theory of Relativity. When in the fall we fall back, turning our clocks back an hour, and as we did yesterday by springing forward, losing an hour as we turned our clocks forward.

Some say this semiannual ritual is outdated. That it is a vestigial product of the agricultural era when men and their sons plowed and worked the fields from sun up to sun down and wanted to make the work day more productive by adding an hour of daylight as the growing season began in early March. And thus 100 years ago Daylight Savings Time was invented. But now that few work on farms, many more in offices, we should just leave our clocks alone, they say, and thereby reduce the confusion and crankiness that inevitably occurs whenever an hour is "lost" or "gained."

I put quotation marks around lost and gained because strictly speaking there is no time lost nor gained--all we do is change the clocks, which, in Einsteinian terms do not in reality keep track of what he would consider time. Time to him, and now to anyone who has even a rudimentary understanding of his work, is independent of our ability to measure it and even if we figured out how to do that in absolute terms, the reality of time would elude us since there is no such thing as time that is immutable. It is relative, shifting as circumstances affect it.

To complicate matters further, there is that supernova we've been hearing about lately that "seems" to explode over and over again, with seems this time in quotes. In quotes because supernovas do not explode repeatably. At the far reaches of the universe, when they explode they do so only once, often leaving residual black holes. But as scientists reported last week about the Supernova Refsdal, approximately every ten years the Hubble telescope picks up images of its billions-of-years-ago cataclysmic destruction.

Einstein taught us this is because gravity has the capacity to bend both light and time. So Refsdal was "seen" to be exploding first in about 1964 (actually this was the visual image of its explosion billions of years ago finally reached us) and then we "saw" it explode again and again in 1995 and 2014 and we will be "seeing" it again, Groundhog Day style, some time around 2020. Not multiple explosions but the same explosion over and over again because the image of it gets to us at different times as the result of gravity's awesome light- and time-bending power. With light becoming a lens through which we "see" cosmic events and experience time.

So rather than grumble about having to fool with our clocks semiannually, why not enjoy participating in Einstein's universe by spending a little time then thinking about the "new" physics, which is now about 100 years old and thus not so new.

I like springing forward and falling back for another reason.

With my mother nearly 107, we have been living the past seven years in her time zone. Traveling up and down the I-95 corridor between New York City, Midcoast Maine, and South Florida. This is in large part to be available to get to her as quickly as possible in case we are needed and also to enable us to live with the guilt that we do not spend all year down south with her. We can say that though we are not here all year at least we won't have to cross any time zones to get to her in an emergency.

This may very well be a rationalization to cover with socially-acceptable denial the probable fact that over time whatever adventurous spirit we have has waned. We tell ourselves that living this way is only for the time being (time being being another Einsteinian concept), that we are eager to resume traveling, to make our long-deferred trip to India, to spend a year living in Rome, to wander through the Greek Islands, but while waiting for the inevitable, the passage of time to contribute to reclaiming whatever wanderlust can be revived, this twice-a-year ritual of adjusting our clocks and watches stands for what travelers are required to do when they "really" cross time zones, with really in quotes.

October 8, 2014--E=MC2

The speed of light is very fast, in fact there is nothing faster in the universe. It is a very big number--light travels at 186,000 miles per second, or 299,792,458 miles an hour, which means that the light emanating from the sun, which is about 93 million miles from Earth, takes only 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach us.

But on a cosmic scale, this is small potatoes.

The galaxy in which our solar system is located is so huge that that hugeness is expressed not in miles but in light years--how many miles light travels in a year. At 186,000 per second, that's very, very far. To give you a sense of that, our galaxy, the disk of the Milky Way, is about 100,000 light years in diameter.

Then, the ultimate measurement, our universe, everything that there is, is 93 billion light years in size, an almost infinitely large number to comprehend.

I have been thinking about the speed of light because a friend, Leslie Woodhead, is writing a book about the Atomic Era, not so much about the science as about the cultural and political consequence of a world full of atomic weapons. He wants to interview me because I am obsessed with The Bomb and how it has affected life on our planet. To satisfy my obsession, I have read and thought much about these issues. In addition, since he's British he wants to gather reflections from Americans who lived as youngsters through the early days of the Atomic Era and Cold War. I qualify in that regard as well.

In thinking what to say to him, I have dipped a bit into the science of the A-Bomb, especially the theory Einstein developed that defined and quantified the convertibility of mass to energy. As evidence and to demonstrate what that would mean in practical terms, converting a relatively smallish mass of Uranium-235 or Plutonium into a massive amount of energy (an atomic explosion), he propounded perhaps the most famous of all mathematical equations--E=MC2, with E representing Energy, M Mass, and C-squared the speed of light times itself.

With the speed of light by far the latest number in the equation, and then squaring it (multiplying it by itself), and then multiplying it additionally by the mass in question, reveals how such a powerful explosion could result in converting such a relatively small mass of radioactive material into energy--the cataclysmic force of an atomic explosion.

For example, a bomb weighing less than 10 tons with a Uranium-235 core weighing only141 pounds of which just one kilogram (2.2 pounds) underwent nuclear fission, an atomic bomb called Little Boy, was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, exploded with the force of 63,000 tons of TNT. Tons. And killed 135,000 Japanese.

I will want to talk with Leslie about take-cover drills in school where we were taught to dive under our desks if we saw a "blinding flash of light" from an A-Bomb exploding over Times Square, ground zero; and how, after the end of World War II, under Cold War pressure all presidents from Truman to Eisenhower to Kennedy to Johnson to Nixon were under pressure from their military advisers to use nuclear weapons preemptively, in turn, against the Soviets, the North Koreans, Cubans, and Vietnamese; and how this led to the establishment of a "national security state" with inordinate power accruing to the President with Congress assigned a subsidiary role, effectively resulting in  the end of  the Founders' concept of the "separation of powers."

But it will be hard to not be thinking about E=MC2, the speed of light, that kilogram of U-235, and those 135,000 killed that August.