School, Scholar, War Clouds

When the day came for registering me for the neighborhood kindergarten, my mom walked me the five short blocks to Stockton School and decided I could manage the walk on my own most of the time. The teachers registered two classes, one morning, the other afternoon. The younger children were put into the “slower” afternoon class, and the older ones were assigned the more mature morning class. Their first reaction was that I was a little young even for the afternoon class. Mom argued them into accepting me. Otherwise I would have had to go home and wait another year. I didn’t like that. Then after a few months, the lead kindergarten teacher decided that I could keep up with the older kids and switched me to the morning program. I was about the youngest in the class. That began a phase of sociophysical backwardness lasting till I reached MIT.

I received Christmas presents, but there was no Christmas tree. That was my Jewish parents’ compromise with living in a primarily Christian neighborhood. When I was seven the big gift I received was an Erector Set. I found it difficult to understand the instructions and to fit the little bolts, washers, and nuts together that erected many things —a wagon, a house, even moving items, depending on a motor included. I put it all aside, but two years later I enjoyed doing it all.

The second-grade teacher mentioned once or twice that one of the children in our class, William, was doing things at home, and later said we were going on a unique trip to his house to see for ourselves what he did. We saw impressive stamp and coin collections, beautifully arranged in books. (I had a small stamp book at home, not really well put together.) We saw pages of butterflies William had netted, pinned, and identified. He had built model cars and airplanes, neatly stored on shelves. Three reactions swept over me: (1) Really?, (2) I could do all that if I wanted to, and (3) I was jealous. Now I recall that as the first time I felt jealous. In my life thereafter I was less and less jealous of anybody.

When I was beginning the third grade, I complained to my mother early in the year that I did not like the teacher. She was unfair and annoying. Duly alarmed, Mom spoke to the Stockton principal, Dr. Miller, who decided to interview me in his office, a place generally associated with disciplinary action. He asked me some questions, had me take a written test, and conveyed his findings to Mom, who shared them with me. He planned to take me out of the third grade and move me up to the fourth grade. He believed I was bored.

I was flattered by the grade skipping, of course. I did not think I was bored—more annoyed. I recalled an episode in the third-grade class.

Out of the blue, and not related to previous work, the teacher had asked the class, “What is the population of the United States?” I had recently heard the number somewhere and my hand shot up. When she called on me, I said, “A hundred million.” ( I knew it was a little more than a hundred million). She shook her head and went on to another child, who said, “A hundred thirty million.” He got her smile and the class’s applause. Not then articulate enough to express what annoyed me, I can explain it now in two ways. First: Neither 100 nor 130 million is exact. They are round-offs of the rapidly changing number of inhabitants (today 300 million). But more important they are very big numbers for anybody—and for a third-grader just infinite. Third-graders were not called upon and had no understanding of demographic analysts, actuaries, marketers, investment managers, and others who dealt with such large numbers with considerable if not total accuracy. Teacher was making a ridiculous distinction, annoying to me, a budding mathematician who loved working with numbers. Second explanation: I was annoyed at not knowing the right answer. There was nothing wrong with the teacher.

In hindsight, skipping a school year had a downside. For years thereafter I was younger than my classmates, socially somewhat awkward, incompatible, and withdrawn. I had few friends and little interest in learning the names of schoolmates. I turned to concentrating on learning and going after good grades.

Much to my embarrassment, my father, Harry Kay, carried my latest high-school report card in his pocket to show friends what a brilliant student his son was. I did not think of myself as brilliant. I liked learning. There was a huge amount I did not know and just liked to study and learn. That’s the way I thought. He clearly expected me to become a scholar. Without discussion and without knowing what it really meant, I accepted and internalized the scholar role.

In high school I took the chemistry course in my junior year. The teacher, “Doc” Summers, did a great job covering the subject at high-school level and encouraging students to ask him questions. One day I asked about carbon monoxide poisoning, not just in a garage or kitchen without fresh air circulation but, “How about the CO from all the world’s automobiles slowly poisoning us?” His response was, “In the atmosphere CO gradually oxidizes to CO2. No problem.” But there was a problem and the world was in the earliest stage of its recognition. Neither Doc Summers nor anybody else in 1940 knew what was probably to become the number one question for science for the next sixty years and continuing even more dominantly into the twenty-first century too. I guess it would be expecting too much for Doc Summers so long ago to properly introduce the issue of global climate change. Funny, in all the discussion of ominous greenhouse gasses and other effects on the biosphere’s weather, I have not heard anything on the role of carbon monoxide.

I took physics in my senior year, 1940 to 1941. To my family the word physics meant the consumption of pills and supplements to improve you physically. The physics teacher was not so good. The years 1939 to 1941 corresponded to the slow-motion explosion of WWII. In my last two years in high school, the effects of WWII were hitting high school students too. Some were old enough to be drafted as soon as they graduated. I was much too young for that, but I lost something I was looking forward to: a course offered in auto mechanics. The shop for it was great. The teacher left just after I had attended its first classes and no replacement was thereafter available to use the shop until the war ended. One last peaceful summer, then, thanks to those good grades, off to MIT to join the new class of ’45. Because of the impending war, MIT graduation was not to be in 1945 but was delayed several years.

(This is an excerpt from MILITARIST MILLIONAIRE PEACENIK: Memoir of a Serial Entrepreneur by Alan F. Kay and reprinted with the permission of the author)