The Eudaemonic Pie

by Thomas A Bass

  At 5:00 A.M., when not directing traffic around the Big Ditch, Doyne reported to the paper shack for his daily lesson in Satyagraha. The other paper boys fancied themselves tough customers, the two orneriest being James Wetsel, who tooled around town in a car he called his “pussy wagon,” and Herbie Watkins, who was Wetsel’s goon.

  “Their big thing was to beat the daylights out of me every morning,” Doyne said. “I’d walk in and one of them would tackle me. They’d take off all my clothes and throw them outside in the snow. Being a pacifist at the time, whenever they did anything I’d go limp. I had read something in the sixth grade that convinced me that was the best response to violence. But it didn’t work very well.”

  It was also in that busy year that Doyne encountered the most significant influence in his life. He was attending the weekly Boy Scout meeting when someone stood up and introduced himself as Tom Ingerson, a physics teacher at the university who wanted to help out with the troop.

  “I homed in on him immediately,” said Doyne. “I didn’t know at the time what a physicist was, but I knew it was some kind of scientist, and that that’s what I was going to be.”

  After the Scout meeting, walking home with Ingerson, Doyne told him how he wanted to be a physicist. The two of them—a twelve-year-old kid and a twenty-five-year-old college teacher fresh out of graduate school—recognized an immediate attraction for each other: the gravitational pull of minds equally restive. They began what Ingerson described as “hundreds and hundreds of discussions about everything under the sun. In a town where the average random kid thought only about going to the mines or becoming a shopkeeper, Doyne and I were bored for much the same reasons.”

  Something about this man intrigued Doyne, and on later visiting Tom’s house, he got an intimation of what it was. “Filled with a mess of books and tools and Salvation Army furniture, the house was completely disordered inside and out, and somehow this really impressed me.”

  Tom Ingerson’s anomalous presence in Silver City was due to a mixture of romance and political miscalculation. On finishing high school in El Paso, Texas, Ingerson, another son of an engineer, spent an alienated four years at Berkeley before going on to do graduate work in physics at the University of Colorado. While nearing the end of a dissertation on Einstein’s cosmology and the theory of general relativity, he went looking for a job. This was 1964. Sputnik and the cold war had the country crazed for scientists. They could snap their fingers and walk into laboratories anywhere from Boeing to Bell. Colorado was a good school, Ingerson a bright fellow. He should have gone places. Instead, he went nowhere.

  His letters remained unanswered. No one interviewed him. In his naiveté, he took the matter personally and got depressed. It was only years later that a friend at Motorola showed him the bad news in his file. A strong-willed loner like Ingerson may have been ignorant, or he may even have courted disapprobation by naming Frank Oppenheimer as a reference. But even at that late date, the reputation of Robert Oppenheimer’s brother as a fellow traveler made him leprous company. Having him recommend you to a prospective employer was like announcing a contagious disease.

  So Ingerson found himself banished to the hinterlands of southwestern New Mexico. His one and only job offer came late in the season from Western New Mexico University, the old Territorial Normal School, which, in spite of its new name, was still primarily a teacher’s college. Taking up his duties at WNMU as the sole member of the physics “department,” Ingerson consoled himself with a number of thoughts. Roughened into mesas and wilderness tracts, this was country he already knew and loved. Once out in the middle of it, he could keep himself amused. He devised a long list of projects and schemes, the most romantic of which involved a gold mine in the Jefferson Davis Mountains of west Texas. A sixteenth-century Spanish mine, the claim had come into Ingerson’s possession via his uncle Jim. This grizzled prospector, with a degree from the yarn-spinning school of life, had told his nephew a story of fabulous riches. No less than nineteen tons of gold had supposedly been saved from ambush and buried somewhere under his mountain.

  Ingerson’s other uncle, Earl, a geologist at the University of Texas, called the story hogwash, but the newly hooded Doctor of Physics believed strongly enough in his golden legacy to describe it as “the reason I moved to Silver City in the first place.”

  Ingerson is the quintessential physicist. Possessed of a resonant, slightly didactic voice, he can discourse at length on any question pertaining to matter and motion. There is not a mechanical, electrical, computational, or cosmological problem toward which he has not directed his powers of ratiocination. The simplest inquiry garners his total attention. An offhand remark about differences in color film, for instance, will spark him into delivering a minilecture on spectroscopy and the psychology of color perception. During one such discussion, interrupted for twelve hours by other matters, Ingerson resumed his comments at precisely the point where they had broken off. “That’s just the way I am,” he said. “I like to complete a line of thought.”

  Ingerson’s blue eyes shine out of a broad face that reddens easily with humor. But from his domed forehead down to his track shoes, his entire demeanor bears the mark of being dictated by rationality. Compact and solid, his body looks as if it might have been designed according to sound energetic principles. Ingerson dresses in layers of long- and short-sleeved cotton shirts that can be seasonally adjusted, and no social occasion merits the slightest change in attire. He travels with backpack and bedroll and recommends, when pressed for space, the omission of all inessentials, such as toothbrush handles and toothpaste.

  “I’m a physicist,” he said, “because every other way of looking at the world is too difficult for me. In physics we abstract things into simple systems, and if the world doesn’t fit, we just lop some of it off and get it simple enough for our models. This is really very easy to do, even though most people think physics is hard.”

  The night he and Doyne first met and walked home together from the Boy Scout meeting, they talked about Ingerson’s gold mine and how, with as little as seventeen million dollars from it, one could build a rocket and travel to Mars. “Tom thought the space program was being utterly mismanaged,” said Doyne. “Old farts like Wernher von Braun were making stupid rockets, but he knew the way to do it more cheaply and efficiently.” While still in high school, with chemicals ordered from advertisements in the back of Popular Science, Ingerson had built and fired dozens of rockets for launches of up to five miles across the desert. Later, in college, he had worked summers at the White Sands Missile Range testing larger rockets. “You have to remember,” said Doyne, “that Tom knew what he was talking about.”

  Doyne soon found himself enrolled as the charter member in what would become Ingerson’s major Silver City diversion. One day the young college teacher declared his residence open as Explorer Post 114. A duplex stationed under a clump of Chinese elms lining a tributary to the Big Ditch, Ingerson’s house was quickly overrun with boys soldering radios, practicing Morse code, stripping down dirt bikes, and tuning the engine on a Dodge van. Christened the Blue Bus, this vehicle would carry the peripatetic Ingerson and his extended family thousands of miles, from Alaska to the Andes.

  Their first trip was to Boulder, Colorado, where the Explorers accompanied Ingerson for the oral defense of his dissertation. Once bitten with wanderlust, they spent every free moment after that touring the Gila Wilderness and Sonoran Desert. At Christmas they traveled to Mexico and during the summer made longer trips to the Yucatan, Panama, and Peru. When not on the road, they spent their time in Silver City raising money at auctions, turkey shoots, car washes, demolition derbies, and a yearly fair known as Gold Rush Days, in which the Explorers re-created a town full of Indians, assayers, sheriffs, prospectors, and claim jumpers searching for hidden caches of golden rocks. “My personality is basically synergistic,” said Ingerson. “I don’t do much by myself. But together with someone else, things happen. My greatest pleasure in life is seeing
other people have a good time.”

  Besides travel, Explorer Post 114 specialized in electronic tinkering. Ingerson attracted boys of a scientific bent, or perhaps he sparked that interest in the first place. “I’ve always been perturbed by my influence on the kids,” he said. “I never set out to make them physicists. I didn’t care what they became. I enjoyed their company and thought I might help make them better adults than they might otherwise have become.”

  The troop acquired other of its leader’s characteristics, including a disdain for social approbation. “As long as the Post lasted,” said Doyne, “we prided ourselves that not one person earned a single merit badge or advanced any rank in scouting.” When Johnny Reynolds said he was considering getting the one additional badge required to become a Life Scout, he was dissuaded by a combination of physical arguments known as pink bellies, kidney pulses, and bellybutton tests.

  After Doyne bought a Honda 50, and Tom a Yamaha 100, motorcycles became another big part of the Post’s activities. “My house, dump that it was,” recalled Ingerson, “was made even dumpier by having motorcycle engines all over the living room and crankcases in the kitchen sink and pots of grease and oil everywhere. It was terrible.” While out in the driveway laboring over inert metal, Ingerson and the boys conversed for hours about motorcycles and life. “We talked,” said Doyne, “about physics, sexual mores, history, politics, everything.”

  “I treat all questions as fair,” said Ingerson, “even if I have to say that no one knows the answer. Asking questions about the number of stars in our galaxy or the origins of the universe, these kids had parents and teachers ignorant of whether or not anyone knew the answers.”

  In his first year of high school Doyne took over the spare bedroom in Ingerson’s house. His family, which now included a younger brother, was leaving Silver City for Peru, where his father would work as a mining engineer. Moving again from the Peruvian desert to an iron mine in the jungles of Venezuela, the Farmers would spend the next seven years in South America. Doyne visited during vacations, and sometimes worked in the mines as an obrero, but he lived mainly with Tom during his first two years in high school.

  “I never regarded ours as an adult-child relationship,” said Ingerson. “Doyne has always been just about my closest friend. It was like we were roommates. I’ve always felt more like Doyne’s older brother. I never made any rules. There were never any fatherly disciplinary talks. He always seemed to me to be grown up. Doyne was Doyne and he did what he thought best.”

  He may have been the smartest kid in his class, but Doyne still got in trouble with teachers who resented his obvious boredom with school. “At Silver High you had to be dumb to get a B. The C’s were reserved for kids who couldn’t speak English. That meant that anyone with half a brain who spoke English got all A’s.”

  Doyne had other interests he cared more about than school. He played viola and guitar and later took up the blues harp. He passed the test for a ham radio license and worked on science projects with Tom, including an unsuccessful effort to build a facsimile machine for sending pictures via radio. He acted in school plays and got a reputation for being a daredevil. At a chicken-eating contest held during the all-you-can-eat night at the Holiday Inn, he won handily by consuming thirty-two pieces of fried chicken. “And I’m pretty sure we went out afterwards for dessert.”

  A lanky kid shooting up through adolescence, Doyne had a big appetite as well for adventure, books, friends—everything his mind could come in contact with and absorb. He also had a knack for making his enthusiasms the general rage. “We looked up to Doyne and his crowd,” said a former schoolmate. “While they went off on adventures to Alaska and South America, we girls in town didn’t have anything comparable to do. We took over the school paper or got silly instead. Doyne unconsciously broke a lot of hearts in Silver City.”

  Explorer Post 114 met weekly on Wednesday nights for a game of capture the flag and lecture on a subject of general interest. The address one week was given by a twelve-year-old named Norman Packard. Discussing crystal radios, their design and construction, he spoke in a barely audible squeak. Possessed of an outsized head perched on a mere spindle of a body, Norman, if you wanted to know about radios and electronics in general, was the person to ask.

  Two years shy of the official age for becoming an Explorer, he was adopted into the Post anyway. This was Doyne’s first conscious meeting and the start of a lasting friendship with his younger protégé. I say conscious because in Silver City everyone knows everyone else all along.

  “I have a feeling from looking at pictures of myself growing up,” said Norman, “that my head was always too big for my body. It accentuated the cerebral quality that was a social stigma in the first place.” On the way to sprouting past six feet two inches in height, Norman remembered “growing a little bit and then having to figure out where my hand was. My father called me Slewfoot, just to remind me that I didn’t really have it all together.”

  The first of six children, Norman Harry Packard was born in 1954 in Billings, Montana, where his father managed the Sears, Roebuck store, “although he didn’t fit too well into the corporate mold,” said Norman. With the promise of a new career, Mr. Packard was lured to Silver City, where his wife’s parents had built a chain of five-and-ten-cent stores into more extensive holdings. “My grandfather at the time owned half of Silver City’s lower- and middle- class housing. My father was supposed to break into the landlord business by managing apartments, but it wasn’t his cup of tea.”

  Norman’s father and mother simultaneously launched themselves into yet another career. They went back to school, got their teaching certificates, and moved the family south to Hachita, a town near the Mexican border with a population of seventy-two, including all eight Packards. Spread over a great plateau of desert wedged between the Hatchet and Cedar mountains, this is ranching country. “It was pretty isolated,” said Norman, “although it was nice to grow up with so much space. Our front yard consisted of a range of mountains with more vacant miles than you could think of walking.”

  By the time Norman gave his first Explorer Post lecture, the family had moved back to Silver City, where his mother taught second grade and his father handled junior high school mathematics. The Packards occupied a brick house on the corner of Bayard and Broadway, the old commercial street in town. Theirs was the largest private residence in Silver City, although its twenty-three rooms had suffered considerable depredation, including subdivision into numerous apartments. The growing Packard family reclaimed most of these, although a laissez-faire policy left several boarders in place until they died or moved off. In a house so big that its rooms were referred to by number, an extra person or two threading up and down the front stairs was barely noticed. Doyne himself, during his last year in high school, lived with the Packards.

  Directly across from the Packard house lay the Post Office, until it was moved a few years ago to a more promising part of town. While the foot traffic was still good, Norman took advantage of the location to open two of his three successful businesses. On an enclosed porch facing Broadway, he operated the largest tropical fish outlet in Grant County. Posted hours for the Silver Aquarium were “after school,” when Norman was also open for business as a TV repairman. While still in the seventh grade, he had convinced Colby’s hardware store to hire him as the assistant TV repairman. He was supposed to help the man nominally in charge of the operation, but it was really Norman who fixed the TVs. Quitting after a year and a half, when Mr. Colby refused to raise his salary above $1.50 an hour, Norman turned his bedroom into an electronics shop complete with multiple power outlets and a workbench covered with cannibalized TVs.

  Norman by then was also reporting daily to the paper shack, where James Wetsel and the other tough customers had been replaced by a more sober crowd. Norman evaluates the success of his early business careers as follows: “I was a rotten paper boy—that is, rotten at making money. It was my first experience with a monetary sche
me that looked good in theory but that actually proved more dismal. I was supposed to make forty dollars a week, but never collected anywhere near that amount. I enjoyed the tropical fish, and probably sold enough gravel and fish food to break even on personal expenses. The TV repair business was more lucrative and pretty simple, except for the occasional glitch that just wouldn’t go away.”

  Norman had introduced himself to Tom Ingerson by asking questions about a radio he was building. But long before he met Tom, Norman knew that physics was his métier. “Since the second grade it’s been clear that I was going to be a scientist. That was my burning interest. I remember a student teacher keeping me after class in the fourth grade to ask me what I was going to be when I grew up, and I told her without a moment’s hesitation, ‘A nuclear physicist.’ I was on the track to being a physicist before I met Tom, but it was helpful having him there to cultivate that side of my existence. From the perspective of a teenage kid, Tom knew everything there was to know about physics.”

  Ingerson lasted four years in Silver City. His primary motive for staying that long, he said, was to take care of his Explorers. He subsequently moved to the University of Idaho, which had fellow members in a real physics department. But he left behind in Silver City the germ of an idea that would soon blossom in unexpected ways.