The Wizard And The Minister Of Music

“The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.” - Winston Churchill. Nothing is as hard as seeing the future from the past, and nothing is as rewarding as seeing the past from the future. Life at The Bat Cave was filled with precursors to and causes of my adult life. Last week, I talked about my future career as a non-prodigy physicist. This week, I'll tell you how my future as a minister of music looks through the crystal ball of the past.

Children learn from watching what people around them do, and then reenacting what they see in play. When I was a kid, I “played” everything. I played war. I played baseball. I played Batman - which was easy since I was Batman. I played “Work” - which was a boring game since I didn't understand what Dad did when he went there. One day, a friend of mine and I cast around for something to do; and we decided to play church. It was a reasonable thing to decide, since we spent hours every week sitting in church. The pastor, the minister of music, the choir, the pianist, the organist, and the Sunday School director all got up on the platform every week and did things that we didn't always understand; but that we could always predict. The pastor stood up and talked forever. The Sunday School director went to the pulpit and told how many people had been in Sunday School. I remember being very excited when my Aunt Gloria told me that the number of people he reported included children because I thought only the adults counted. The minister of music directed all of the singing.

To me, the minister of music was the most important and amazing person in the church. He had the ability to control the actions of every single person in the church by simply waving his arms around. When he moved his arms in a certain way, everyone stood up. When he moved his arms a different way, the pianist and organist played music. When he moved his arms in a slightly different way, everyone sang. No one ever did anything other than what the minister of music made them do with his arms. He was like the wizard in Fantasia! Naturally, when we decided to play church, I made my friend be the pastor. I wanted to be the minister of music. Singing was fun; and controlling a building filled with people by simply waving your arms was a mysterious, wonderful ability!

My favorite song was Power In The Blood.  

Isaac Newton And The Motorcycle

Life at The Bat Cave was filled with precursors to and causes of my adult life. In hindsight, my love of reading, adventure, intelligence work, science, music, and my future as a minister of music could all be told from the year that we lived there. When I was about four years old, I learned about physics.

My friend and I were standing in the front yard, throwing rocks across the road. To a four-year-old arm, the tiny, almost-two-lane blacktop was an enormous distance from side to side. We thought that our throws were tremendous feats of athleticism, even though I doubt we ever got one all the way across. Suddenly, we had a problem. A motorcycle was coming down the street. To the best of my knowledge, it was the first motorcycle I had ever seen; but a motorcycle is something that you instinctively understand, because it looks like a bicycle. We knew that we shouldn't throw any rocks at the motorcycle. After all, throwing rocks at people was bad – this had been clearly explained at some point. Since I could see that the motorcycle rider was not the Joker, or the Penguin, or the Riddler, he had nothing to fear from riding down Batman's street, indeed, right in front of the Wayne Mansion. The only problem was how long it was taking for him to pass by us. It seemed that it took hours for that motorcycle to cover the hundred or so yards between Governor's Drive and my position in front of The Bat Cave. With a sudden insight, I realized that if I would throw my rock before he got to me, the rock would go across the road before the motorcycle got there! Brilliant! I threw the rock when the motorcycle was a good eight or ten feet to my left, and was astonished to watch the motorcycle drive into my rock as it flew across the street!. It seemed that the rock had somehow curved into the driver.

In 1966, there was a socially-agreed-upon response to kids who threw rocks at motorcycles. He stopped, knocked on the door to my house, and explained matters to my mother, who beat the tar out of me. Throughout the whole episode, I was trying to understand what had happened. I was mystified. If I threw the rock before the motorcycle got there, how did I manage to hit it? Eventually, I realized that the correct answer to this extraordinary physical conundrum was simple: Don't throw rocks when motorcycles are anywhere near because the moving motorcycle will run into the rock (I wasn't exactly a child prodigy physicist). I also generalized this to cars and bicycles (I was cautious).

It was my first exposure to Newtonian mechanics. And leading your target. And motorcycles. 

Superman!

There is no way to write about my childhood without talking about my Aunt Gloria, whom everyone always called “Gloria”. My father's sister, she lived with us while we were at the Pine Avenue house; and I thought she was the greatest thing ever. Gloria was 4'4” tall, and didn't loom like the other adults. She had a huge personality, and she thought I hung the moon. How could I not love her?

Gloria had moved to Huntsville from Mobile in the wake of the Brookley AFB closure, and she got a job with NASA as a secretary. She lived with us while we were at The Bat Cave on Pine Avenue. When she met William, whom she later married, she would even take me on dates with him. I thought it was awesome, because they would let me have Zero candy bars. (Mom and Dad wouldn't let me have them, because I didn't actually like them, and never ate the whole thing. But, really, a WHITE chocolate bar! How cool is that?) Occasionally, if I was very good, Mom and Dad would let me sleep in her bed. She would tell me bedtime stories, when I did sleep with her; and the young Batman thought her repertoire was huge. I learned to love scary stories from her. I don't remember the stories now; but one was called The Little Devil Story, and it scared the pants off of me. The Big Devil Story, on the other hand, scared me so badly that I had to be in a particularly brave mood to listen to it. I wasn't that brave very often. I loved them! Ever since then, scary stories have made me happy.

Gloria would read to me, and play with me; and I looked forward to her arrival every day after work. One day something happened that she talked about for years. When she got home, I saw that she was wearing a red dress that had an exceptionally large collar in the back. I greeted her with, “Gloria, let's play Superman and Batman! You don't have to change clothes. You already have a cape on!”

I never lived it down.  

Snake!

I need to take you back to Hollinger's Island, when I was around 3 years old (before the move to Huntsville), because I forgot that I remembered something. I suppose that's better than remembering something that never happened; but it's not as good as remembering something that I had forgotten.

Anyone who knew me before I was 35 years old knows that I was afraid of five kinds of snakes: big ones, little ones, live ones, dead ones, and play ones. Make that four kinds of snakes. I never saw a little snake. This story probably explains why I thought all snakes were at least 12 feet long.

We were living in a brick house behind Hollinger's Island Baptist Church, which wasn't right on a canal or river; but it's impossible to get very far from water on Hollinger's Island, and water moccasins love it. Dad was in the back yard fighting a water moccasin (cottonmouth) with a hoe. Mom, Cathy, and I were standing at the sliding glass door watching this unfold. The door was open at least a little bit and the dog, whose name I don't remember, decided that she should run out to see Dad. Cathy and I started howling, Mom started calling the dog back, and Dad yelled at the dog to go away. No dice. The snake was between Dad and the dog, and the dog didn't see the snake. The snake's mouth opened so wide that it seemed it could swallow the world, and we could see that the inside of its mouth really was as white as cotton. The snake struck the dog on one of its front paws. This apparently distracted the snake long enough for Dad to chop it up with the hoe. The next thing I remember was looking at this strange goo oozing out of the dog's paw. I was very upset, and I suspect I cried a lot. I don't remember who took the dog to the vet, but the vet didn't do anything. He said the dog would either live or die, and there wasn't a lot to be done one way or the other. The dog lived, but hair never again grew where the snake's fangs had injected venom into the her paw.

That's why all snakes are 12 feet long.