In 1956, while I was in 4th grade at Hokah Elementary, I first became aware that we had presidential elections. I can remember going with Granpa Lee to vote, probably at a school or town hall. It was a small building and they gave me a little piece of paper that I could scribble on and place in a children's ballot box. I can remember some official there asking me who I voted for and I replied, quite seriously, Taft.
Everyone broke out in hilarious laughter. I have no idea of where I had picked the name up because it had been fifty years since Taft was president. I suspect that I had heard the names of some presidents and liked the name Taft because it sounded like taffy, as in the soft candy. Everything at that age would have been about candy or cookies or other treats.
Grandpa Lee was undoubtedly voting for or against Harry Truman, who was the president when I came into the world. Truman had been followed by Dwight Eisenhower, the WWII general, a very popular man, of course. I do not remember his first election but in 1956 I believe he was running for re-election against Adlai Stevenson.
I can remember it was election night and for some reason we were with Lill and Lee visiting Carrie and Si Nelson in La Crosse. All the adults were watching TV and the results were coming in. I could not figure out why, if Eisenhower was so popular, why did anyone want to beat him and become president. I didn't really understand that there were political parties. It wasn't very late into the evening when it was agreed that Eisenhower was going to win easily. I didn't give it much more thought.
I can remember pontificating that I had learned in 4th grade that water cannot be compressed like air, which is only relatively true. I really had an interest in the solar system and had memorized the diameters, distances from the sun, orbital periods, and some other facts about each of the planets, and it was at this point that Aunt Carrie, of all people, did a remarkable thing.
She took me down into the basement and showed me the little room which was the "lab" put together by her son, Ron, who was very bright, but who had outgrown all this stuff and gone off to college. There was a lot of chemistry stuff--beakers, test tubes, funny shaped glass valves, and a tall stack of magazines, which bore the title "Sky & Telescope".
These magazines were fairly thin, only about thirty or so pages each, but on the back cover, facing the outside, each displayed a glossy, full sized photograph of a deep sky object, portrayed sometimes in false color to make features stand out. Astro photos in that day were not created by computers or charge-coupled devices as they are nowadays, but by long exposures on special film that had to be "cooked" to make it sensitive enough to the scant light detected by huge telescopes.
Many of these pictures were taken through the Mount Polamar 200-inch telescope on a mountaintop in California, and they were of wondrously beautiful objects like the Crab Nebula, the Orion Nebula, and such.
Aunt Carrie boxed up a bunch of this stuff that she wanted out of her basement and gave it to me to take home.
They changed my whole life.
Over the next couple of years, I would cherish the magazines and read all the articles, which were quite beyond me, but they did give me an idea of the problems being addressed at the time. There was always an article by Otto Struve, and it seemed to nearly always be addressing cosmic abundance patterns. It took me a long time to realize that this meant the relative abundances of the elements observed in the sky using spectroscopy and comparing these observations with theories about how the elements were created in the first place.
There were columns as well and the one which captured my fancy was one called "Gleanings for ATMs". I had no idea what this meant; it sounded kind of like they were talking about some kind of atoms, but it was so arcane that I was fascinated. ATMs turned out to be amateur telescope makers.
Having these wonderful magazines in my possession and some of the crazy glassware Ron had experimented with in his basement lab, fueled my interest in space, the solar system, the galaxy, and the universe. Because I read voraciously and constantly rattled off data and facts about these things gave me somewhat of a false reputation of being a child prodigy, which Ron legitimately was, but of which I was merely a pretender.
I had just as much trouble learning my multiplication facts as the next student.
I kept all these precious things on a little desk in my room that my mother had obtained from somewhere, and I cherished them.
At about the same time, I got, probably for Christmas, a book named Young Visitor to Mars. It was an exciting fiction about a young boy who got the opportunity to visit Mars by spaceship. At the time it was believed that Mars was criss-crossed by canals and the boy rode in boats on the canals which were powered simply by dropping a pill into a motor, which reacted with the water, and pushed the boat forward.
I also began collecting plastic models of wartime airplanes like the B-52 Strato Fortress, and model rockets like the Nike Hercules and Nike Ajax and on and on. I would put them together and display them in my room. They would have decals which you soaked in a bowl of warm water, then applied to the plastic. They could be painted, but I didn't try that.
Stories about being shot out into space and out of Earth's gravity by HG Wells and others, could be purchased as comic books, and I devoured them. I also could get comic books about war heroes, some real and some made up. Strangely enough, I can remember a G I Joe comic where the platoon involved were fighting against a country I had never heard of--Viet Nam. This was in 1954-55-56. I can clearly remember being in Pfeffer Valley reading them and wondering why the heck they had such strange names as Viet Nam.
These were wonderful times of discovery and awakening to the marvelous complexity of the universe and I can remember opining basically the argument that with all the millions of stars out in the universe, it would be ridiculous to think that ours was the only one with planets and that there wouldn't be hundreds, if not thousands, of planets, some of which would have to have developed life on them like Earth had.
In this simplest form, this argument is very compelling, because it's contrapositive argument seems so untenable, that there would be only a single such lucky planet. Naturally, I would gradually come to understand that the argument is not so simple. Issac Asimov wrote a delightful book delineating the actual numbers of each pertinent factor, such as the distance from the parent star, the type of star, the inclination of the planet's axis so as to provide seasons, and on and on and on.
It seemed an open and shut case to me that there was indeed life on other planets. Many, many planets, and I looked forward to my whole life of hearing of more and more evidence of extraterrestrial beings. How could I know, of course, that even the celebrated Asimov was merely scratching the initial surface of the problem and that there were so many, many more manifestations of it to come.
But there I was, the little elementary-school space thinker and philosopher, having a ball reading about it all.
