You can read her thoughts by clicking here!  I’m heading west tomorrow and will bring the pens and waterbrushes used in this technique to aspiring artists Maya, Sarah and Adam in Sunnyvale, California.  Looking forward to seeing them and their mom and dad on Sunday.

I would have been more critical of myself, so I’ll thank Amy Rahn for this kind review.  Click HERE!

Click here!

In 1952 when I was 12 years old, Dwight Eisenhower was elected president. In our 7^th grade class debates at Mckinley Junior High School, I was a supporter of Adalai Stevenson. This was on omen. Many of my future political choices would lose elections. Salk Oral Polio immunizations began and I received one. My favorite television show was “Dragnet” starring Jack Webb as detective Joe Friday. In 1952 Ernest Hemmingway published his book “Old Man & Sea,” and U.S. Marines began training in atomic bomb explosion maneuvers in Nevada. One day we were dismissed from school to go home and watch the first televised atomic bomb tests in the Nevada desert. “What a great show!” we all said. “How Wonderful!” I was unaware then of the devastation a few years earlier at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Popular Culture in the 50′s focused around The Cold War with Russia, the Korean War, the “The Red Scare”, and Richard Nixon. Some of my friends’ parents had built Bomb Shelters in their basements and occasionally we would play down there. I created a survival kit that I planned on using in case of atomic war. It had rope, canned soup, a compass, a pocketknife, maps, a first aid kit, an old Geiger Counter that didn’t work, and a variety of over the counter pills (aspirin, antihistamine, vitamins, etc.). UFOs, flying saucers, potential alien invaders were in my thoughts in those days. They were representative of the Red Menace. Joseph McCarthy was in full flower on television. The 1950’s were a decade of mild paranoia. The times were ripe for a host of science fiction movies about aliens and spaceships that I enjoyed immensely. One of my favorites was “The Man From Planet X”. I remember sitting in the theater with my friend Dennis, watching it. In this film, a newspaper reporter flies to a remote island with a scientist friend to cover the approach to earth of a previously unknown world called Planet X. They discover a cone-shaped space ship in which an alien from Planet X has landed to make preparations for further landings of X-people. The scientist’s assistant crosses up the alien, who depends on a tank of X-atmosphere for survival. I was mesmerized by the story and the X-man. He looked to me just like I thought Salinger’s monster character in his story “The Laughing Man” would look if he took off his poppy petal mask. I loved Salinger’s coming of age stories and “The Laughing Man” had a boy character just my age.

The month I finished reading Salinger’s story a circus came to town, and the whole family went. They had a sideshow that advertised “The Man with Two Faces”. I wanted badly to see him. He had the aura of “alien being” to me, but they wouldn’t let kids in without adults so I had to get my father to take me. He had his doubts, but finally agreed. I couldn’t believe I would be so lucky – a man with two faces! I couldn’t imagine it.

We entered the tent and I worked my way up in the front of a large crowd of people facing a stage so I could get a real close look. After about 5 minutes a man came out and walked over to a microphone. He appeared to be wearing a mask, or at least a plastic face that covered his own face, and his speech was a bit muffled. He explained that he had been in a terrible explosion and that it had destroyed much of his face, so that he now had to wear a plastic false face in public. Then he took away the mask. The crowd shrank back. It was a terrible sight for a 12 year old, and I felt nauseous. My father quickly came over and took my arm and we immediately left the tent. I had a visceral feeling of dread and then threw up. Asleep that evening I had nightmares. The man with two faces was in my bedroom, standing silently, transparently, in a dark corner.

I learned later that his name was Sam Alexander, and that he was a normal young man pursuing a career on stage, working at the Shubert Theatre in Chicago when disaster struck. There was a huge gasoline explosion and Sam received deep burns around his lips and cheeks and chin, which eventually became severely infected. To save his life, doctors removed most of his lower face and lips to the bone. The result was horrifying to an uninformed viewer, particularly to a young person who had no expectation of what was coming.

Sam had a terrible time for quite awhile after he recovered from this disaster. Plastic reconstructive surgery was not then what it would become later. After several years of psychological turmoil following his physical trauma, a lifelike mask was created in an effort to fake a normal appearance. In dim light, it was convincing but he still was despondent. There was little chance for him to make a living in a society where appearances were critically important. He eventually saw an ad for a sideshow and he attended, introduced himself to the manager, and unmasked to show himself. He was immediately hired and began touring. I saw him when he came to California with the Clyde Beatty circus.

It took over a month for me to stop thinking each day about the man with two faces. Eventually I did, but I didn’t forget him. He has remained forever somewhere in my psyche. My own experience with several explosions and fires were in my mind, and the possibility of disaster finally became apparent. I thank Sam for that. But I still threw caution to the wind many more times before I left home and went to college.

As a 14 year old in 1953 I was certain that UFOs were hovering over our neighborhood and spent time scanning the sky hoping one might land nearby. The CIA was reviewing evidence for them, worried about possible dangers to US national security.  Exploring the fields and hills around my house at night, I looked up and waited patiently. After an hour or so looking at the stars, I trudged home.  One evening after returning I read in a science magazine that starlight traveling 186,000 miles a second takes many years to get from a star to the earth, and I wondered how stars could be so far away.  The article said many of the stars I saw weren’t there anymore.  Their starlight was so old that by the time it reached my eyes, some had moved to different places in the sky. So the light I saw was from a distant past. All this was strange and fantastic in my mind. If I couldn’t believe my eyes, then what was real?

With infinite numbers of stars and other worlds in outer space, I believed what I heard on the radio and saw on television and at the movies. There were alien beings from other planets flying around observing earth.  The CIA was concerned. So was I; it was the decade of the Red Scare. Aliens and communists were infiltrating the government, flying above and spying on us.

I spent time at the movies and enjoyed the weekly Buck Rogers films on weekends, only slightly discouraged by wires I could see holding up spaceships that Larry “Buster” Crabb flew around in.  Many films in the 50’s were about aliens, spaceships and flying saucers. My favorite film was The Man From Planet X with his strange looking space vehicle like a coffee maker with a turret on top. My belief in flying saucers was certain, even though I’d never seen one.

I graduated from high school in 1957, the same year the Soviet Union launched Sputnik.  It was an exciting time because the government was pouring money into science and science education. I went to college, got a degree in chemistry, and in 1962 had an immediate job offer from Aerojet General Corporation where I became a research and development chemist in a solid rocket propellant lab. Aerojet was the free world’s largest site for rocket engine development, testing, and production. Time magazine called it the General Motors of Rocketry. 

In the short time I worked there, the era of space exploration began in earnest. Aerojet rockets eventually propelled Gemini missions into space and their Apollo Space Propulsion System placed astronauts in orbit around the moon. I worked on the 260 inch diameter solid rocket that was a contender for the first moon launch system. After experiencing a few minor explosions and accidents which left me a little deaf I left Aerojet in 1964 and returned to graduate school, eventually getting a job as a professor of chemistry at UVM.

I saw my first “UFOs” in 1982. Sitting on my balcony late one night looking out over a hill I spotted a bright saucer-shaped, lighted object hovering about a half mile over the ground.  In a few minutes it was joined by two more; they moved together about a half mile to the right and then up higher where they seemed stationary. The objects stayed there over 40 minutes before they disappeared.  A more rational explanation than alien spaceships occurred to me the next day, but I’d like to believe they were UFOs.  I have pictures to prove it.  If you want to see them, let me know.

My imagination and curiosity had free rein when I was young. There seemed no limit to what I could try to do or imagine. This feeling of freedom diminished when I went to college, graduated, and finally went to work at the university. My early years were filled with mistakes, blunders and missteps with model rockets, a few of which almost ended my life, but I remember them as joyful times.  Now 60 years later, on clear, starlit nights when I’m caught up in the daily chores of living, I sometimes go out in the backyard, lie on my back in the grass and look up at the sky. The feeling of wonder and excitement still returns. I always expect to see something amazing.  Yesterday however, though the sky was clear late last night, it was about zero degrees and the grass was covered with ice and snow.

Time Lapse Painting!