Jim's Stories

Hubble and Dad ~ by Jim Neel

Jim posted this on Facebook to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Happy Birthday Hubble and Thank You by Jim Neel

Three days ago, 24 April 2020, marked the thirtieth anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Telescope. It took 21 years to develop and build and even with the best engineers working on the design, it went into orbit with a defective mirror. A spherical aberration that, although mere microns in size, rendered every image fuzzy and out of focus. Our father, confined for many of his last years as a result of two bouts with cancer, followed its development from the beginning.

Dad knew the night sky. If he could see the stars and planets, he knew the season, he knew where he was, he was never lost. He tried his best to teach me, but I was never able to rise to his expertise. Maybe growing up in the plains of the Alabama black belt had something to do with his fascination. The sky there, at least prior to mercury vapor lights, could rival the Southwestern. On trips to Sumter County, we would walk out into the cotton fields at night to a favorite ridge where the Milky Way blanketed us, and on chill, Fall evenings would drag our small reflector telescope and train it on Saturn on Jupiter. We could see the rings and some small points of light that were the gas giant's moons. It could just be that he had an insatiable thirst for understanding. He was Socratic in his belief that knowledge and understanding led to a full life. That lesson his sons did learn.

So, when the mirror failed to perform, Dad was crushed. It took another three years and spacewalking astronauts to fix the mirror while the big silver tube orbited 353 miles above. But they were too late for him. The extraordinary images that we have seen since 1991 came after Dad lost his battle. He missed that first color close-up of Jupiter by one month.

The photo NASA shared three days ago on Hubble's birthday would have made him very happy. I do not believe, as he did, in an afterlife, but I keep him alive by surrounding myself with his things; his science fiction paperbacks, Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, a 1920 copy of the primer Easy Lessons in Einstein are on my desk at home, his oscilloscope, a tube tester and one of his electronic inventions are in my studio on a shelf that overlooks the work I do there. I can still hear his voice, not in our once-nightly phone calls, but in my son’s. Colin's voice has the same timbre, if not his Geiger accent. When I see the NASA deep space images, I can see his face, not the ravaged one with which he left this world, but the one that beamed with delight at seeing Halley's Comet one cold winter night surrounded by his family.

Now, when I walk the dogs late in the evening, I use the SkyView app on my phone to identify the celestial events happening above. I wish I didn’t need it, that I had better learned my lessons, but, somehow, I think the man who lived a life in science would forgive me and approve.

April 27, 2020

The Lottery ~ a conversation with Jim

Jim, I have a new Story Idea for you. First, Listen to Radio Lab: Memory Place. At 11:20, there is a spot about the draft lottery. I'd love to read what you thought, felt, did during those times. I bet you remember Your Number.

Will Do. 107.

It was finals week or maybe the week before, I was in the dorm at BSC down the hall in a room that had a small BW TV. Not sure how many of us were crammed into that room, but some people spread out into the hallway.

There was a 001 and a 365 in the room.

As remember it the number of draftees they anticipated calling up over the next year meant that 1-225 were essentially already drafted. I had a student deferment, until spring of 1971, a bunch of us were loaded up that spring in a bus and driven to the airbase in Montgomery to take physicals and intelligence tests, but I was not called that summer because the draft law had run out.

Must have gotten a call a week from recruiters for officers training from every branch because of my grade on the written test, When congress approved the next one, I was in my first semester of grad school. They called a moratorium on the draft at Xmas, in January 72. I received a letter saying I could keep the deferment and be drafted in May, or I could give it up and if they did not call me before March 15 I would be classified 1H. So I rolled. They didn't. I guess I am technically still 1H.

Did you have friends drafted? Wasn't there a medical deferment path for you? Do you ever wish you had gone in . . . gone to Vietnam?

Yep, I lost four Woodlawn friends in Vietnam. There was an issue with my ankles, but the army ignored it like they did a friend who was literally 20/900 in one eye, both of us were 1A after our trip to Montgomery. I did have a lot of guilt that basically I was one of the "fortunate sons", not sure I ever regretted not being in the military, but Vietnam was the seminal element of my generation, and I was not part of it.

One of my best friends died a few years ago, he was the most talented artist I know, he was a Navy corpsman, platoon medic, during 68, the bloodiest year. He died of prostate cancer from his agent orange exposure during his tours in the field.

My not going is probably at the root of the El Salvador thing. You often wonder how you would hold up in extreme conditions. So it was maybe a self-test. Not the same thing for sure, but I didn't freeze up when the firefight erupted. It was the most crystal clear moment of my life. Going back there the second time, having survived the first, was harder but necessary.

Now, I did consider enlisting so I could fly jets, never once considered Canada or CO status, but I never equated Vietnam with WWII, never fell for the domino effect, never fell for Westmoreland's lies about winning that war.

Note: Mine is # 238; I was seventeen in 1970. This is a good start as I try to get a very busy professor to contribute to this page.

Valdosta by Jim Neel

Valdosta. Hot humid Spanish moss dripping town near the border of Georgia and Florida. My memories of the place are old and worn by the sixty-plus years that have come and gone between. the years we spent there. Second-grade and third-grade memories. Everything seemed bigger. It's curious what stands out, what doesn't? 

The details I remember, the large important things that I can't. There are some vivid images. Snakes. Snow. Jet bombers. A dying dog.

In 1955, or was it 56, Southern Railway decided to replace their copper wire telegraph communication system with the new developments in microwave technology. And they sent my father there to develop and maintain their small experimental tower system that was not unlike the cell phone towers of today. The terrain in that part of the country was pretty ideal, flat, rural, undeveloped for the most part. Parts of it were prone to flooding and home to diamondback rattlers longer than a Chevy Bel Air, but ideal for the system. The towers, which at the time needed line of sight locations, could because there were really no elevation changes to get in the way, be shorter, cheaper.

I would turn eight shortly after Mom, John, and I arrived to join Dad. We had stayed in Birmingham so I could finish the first grade at Kennedy Elementary and Mom could find a tenant for our house in Wahouma. Johnny would have been two or three, not sure Don was even a serious plan at the time, but they obviously planned to return to Alabama, when the microwave project had run its course. For me, it was an adventure. Dad had rented a garage apartment for us that belonged to two elderly sisters, one widowed the other never married. Mrs. Claus and Miss. Godchaux. The place seemed like a treehouse to me. The two women treated me like a little prince. Dressed me up and took me to Sunday mass with them. Fed me fireplace-toasted pecans in their Victorian living room in the winter and fresh limeade on the front porch in the summer gave me books they thought I should read. Chocolates, just one, we don't want to spoil your dinner.

Across the street in a small house was a family of four. They had beehives and grew their own tomatoes and their home and clothes always smelled of honey and the ripe red fruit. Their son was my age, the daughter a couple of years older, they introduced me to fresh honey, Saturday movie matinees, and Buck Rogers serials. She introduced me to Elvis Presley. I still have the first 45 I bought, Love Me Tender. I had a crush on her.

It was during that first year that I discovered that I was an artist. I had the best second-grade teacher, Mrs. Pidgeon, who recognized that I could draw and illustrate the stories I was reading, the news I was hearing. A painting of catching my first big mouth bass on a trip to my grandmother's. A painting of the B52s that flew over the snow-covered city. The painting of a man in a barrel going over Niagara Falls got me a congratulatory trip to the principal's office and my first solo exhibition in the halls of Sallas Mahone Elementary. She wasn't the art teacher, but she is probably the reason I became one. It was certainly her encouragement that led me to think of myself, even at that age, as an artist.

Jewell Futch, my best friend's father was the Sheriff of Lowndes County and lived a block away. Times were different then, maybe safer for children, or maybe it was a time of naiveté, but we pretty much went wherever we wished, be home before dark. Accompanied by Ben's big German shepherd, we explored every nook and cranny of the neighborhood. After all, we were official Junior Sherriff's Deputies. And had silver badges to prove it. One day we watched his dog, who had gotten out of his backyard and come to find us, struck by a semi on Main Central Avenue, bleed to death at our feet. More than on one occasion, down by the Lowndes County Courthouse Square in the city center, we hung out with the Goat Man. A Roma tinker who traveled the South in a painted wooden wagon with clanking cookware hanging all over and pulled by a team of goats. A couple of times a year he would show up and repair pots and pans and sharpen scissors and I was fascinated by his drills and hammers and metal files and focused craftsmanship.

The second-year we moved to a duplex neighborhood on the other side of town, closer to Moody Air Force Base. I wish I could say more about the newer larger school I attended but it was just larger and equally as unnoteworthy. The only thing I remember was they wanted to move me up a year, but Dad said no, he'll spend half the year trying to catch up on what he skipped. But the neighborhood, well that was something else. It was heaven. Most of the tenants were servicemen who worked at the airbase and their families. The men flew B52s and T38 trainers and F100 fighters. The kids had been to lots of places in their short lives, their moms were Japanese, Korean, and British. A serviceman and his Japanese wife occupied the other half of our building. The stories she told of her family's brutal and dangerous life under the occupying Japanese army were harrowing. My best friend's mom kept a ceramic caricature of Winston Churchill on the coffee table in their living room. She was from London. The kids had stories to tell of their own, often with accents, and were adventurous risk-takers. From the older ones, I learned to build, how to and where to search for snakes, and how to catch them when you find them. We were moviegoers. Saturday movies changed from cowboys and Indians to Vincent Price horror movies and cautionary science-fiction monster and alien films: The House of Wax (a sculptor kills people and encases them in wax as art). Godzilla (prehistoric monster awakened by atom bomb test wreaks havoc on Japan. Them! (giant ants from desert nuclear tests wreak havoc) Invasion of the Body Snatchers (during the McCarthy trials people are replaced by alien soulless look-a-likes) and my all-time favorite, The Day the Earth Stood Still ( the civilizations of the universe, tired of watching us war on each other send a robot and an ultimatum).

We built a treehouse that spanned three pine trees, it had carpet, a porch, and furniture and roof shingles from materials we scrounged from the nearby building sites. We searched the creek bank behind our row of houses day and night for snakes, turtles, and mudpuppies. Word of warning: Don’t reach into a bucket of muddy water and proudly pull out two long black mudpuppies to show your mom. I am still a little hard of hearing from that scream. One summer, when the mosquitos were especially bad, we formed a team and caught 200 frogs and let them go in our backyards. While exploring, near the creek two of my friends and I found a large pile of sand, grown over with weeds, hidden by the swamp grass and willows. Long forgotten, it was the perfect place for a secret hideout. So, we hollowed it out for a clubhouse. When the unsupported walls became too thin, it collapsed on us, nearly suffocating my two buddies and me. Scared witless, we decided never to tell our parents.

Johnny and I shared a double bed covered in a cowboy print spread, don't touch me, move over, you are on my side, Mom he's touching me. One winter night, I was awakened by the sound of a B52 flying very low over the house. When I got to the window just in time to see it pass overhead I saw that the world outside my window had turned white. It was the first time it had snowed in Valdosta in more than a hundred years. My dad's best friend Bill Freeman, who had grown up in Valdosta, told Dad that when he looked out the window he thought he had died and that this was what heaven looked like.

I loved the Freeman's, they had an Encyclopedia Britannica that put all the world’s knowledge at my fingertips, shiny black ceramic sculptures of slinky panthers on their living room mantel, Bill brought a seven-foot-long diamondback by the house to show Johnny and me one day, when he pulled it out of his car trunk, it was missing its head. The Freeman’s had an eighteen-year-old daughter. She wore peddle-pushers and shirts tied in a knot at the waist like you see on Band Stand and loved rock and roll. Judy Freeman was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

We often went as a family on weekends with dad to the microwave installations. They were small, a metal 8' x 10' building for the electronics and power source next to a three-sided steel tower about 75’ to 100’ tall. Each installation was surrounded by a locked 8’ chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. The aircraft warning lights seem to have needed changing more often than they should. When they did, dad had to climb up inside the tower and change them. No OSHA safety harness. There were several locations in Georgia and Florida. Once, when there was major flooding at one of the Florida installations (maybe Perry, FL) that knocked out the electrics, Dad arrived to find the barbed wire covered in rattlers and copperheads.

We took a few trips that I remember. One to the Okefenokee Swamp, the other to Suwanee River State Park where we cooled a watermelon in the water. I think I have a picture of that that I took with my little Brownie. But the pace we went on family outings the most was right outside of Valdosta. Twin Lakes. There we swam, picnicked. There are some 1956 songs, Clyde McPhatter's Treasure of Love, Gene Vincent's Be Bop A Lula, Frankie Lymon's Why do Fools Fall in Love, that are eternally tied to my memory of that place, sunburns and the smell of cocoa butter. There was a loudspeaker that played whatever the teenagers were playing on the jukebox in the pavilion. When we went with the Freemans, which was most of the time, Judy would take me there to watch her and her friends bop and jitterbug.

Don was born in Valdosta, 28 September 1957. He was our parent's last attempt to have a daughter. It didn't work that time either. I don't think it was much longer before the microwave installation project ended and Dad was offered the position as Supervisor of Communications for Southern Railway and we returned to Birmingham in time for school in 1958. We took the Freeman's Britannica with us.