To Uncle Roger's Family -
We were so sorry to hear that Uncle Roger passed away. He lived a very full life and will be sorely missed. We were fortunate to have known him.
May time help to ease the pain of your loss. Sincerely, Gary and Bernice Browne

Cold Fusion and Other Crazy Ideas:

Cold Fusion and Other Crazy Ideas:

My dad, as I have said was a nuclear physicist who was an undergraduate at Cal Tech and got his Ph.D. in physics from Berkeley. He did particle, high energy, and cosmic ray physics as well has nuclear engineering. He taught at U.C. Berkeley for many years. Those credentials did not prevent him from having unique ideas.  I grew up in the People’s Republic of Bezerkley during the 1960’s. My school bus was tear gassed during the anti-war and civil rights riots. I learned Swahili in school and read books in Ebonics. We had posters of Angela Davis and the Chicago Seven on the walls of my 6^th grade class room. Despite this liberal bastion, my father did not fit the normal “Berkeley” liberal mold. Oh, he believed in free speech, and freedom of expression, and women’s liberation, contraception, mini skirts, and all that,  but he was not a Berkeley Liberal. One of the first realizations that things were not normal in my household was when, after 3 years of complaining to my father about having to study Swahili in elementary school, my dad went to an open house. The teacher gave the standard lecture on how to organize and start a riot and my dad turned to me and said. “Pack up your things, you won’t be back.” It was only six weeks until the end of sixth grade and I was suddenly in private school.

It didn’t stop there, this was in the middle of the Viet Nam war. There were anti-war protests all over Berkeley. There were riots on Telegraph Avenue where they broke every store front window to retaliate against “the man”. People’s park was set up.  My dad thought we just weren’t fighting a real war in Viet Nam. If we wanted to win, we could. I think he was the only parent I knew in Berkeley that wouldn’t allow you to wear a peace sign and felt that we should escalate the war. He had been in WW2, he had seen a real war. He had driven along Patton’s lines. He knew what a serious war was. From our house in the Berkeley hills one could hear continuous bongo drums for many years. It was like a Tarzan movie with restless natives, only there were eucalyptus trees.

When some Berkeley problem would be in the newspapers, like drugs, or riots. He would say something like. “Put me in charge for one day and that won’t be a problem.” It made you wonder what he thought should be done but it always sounded like something Patton would say. “Drugs, not a problem. Put me in charge for one day and it won’t be a problem.” “Dad, what would you do?” “Well, you line em up against a wall, and shoot them. Drugs, not a problem.” His views on drugs, or civil disobedience, were very clear. They usually involved something that would have qualified him as a Stalinist, but he wasn’t .He just wanted to be clear what his view was.  

When environmentalism became popular and the Sierra Club objected to building stuff, my father would say, josh, “I didn’t know the Sierra Nevada Mountains ran through that part of Berkeley”, or that part of wherever it was. The way to protect the Sierra Nevada mountains, is to build a better freeway so people can drive through them without stopping to bother the animals. It makes a lot of sense, if you want a pristine environment, make it so people can avoid being in it, by driving through quickly. Reinforced concrete superhighways, that is the way to protect the environment.  My dad was a big proponent of reinforced concrete and nuclear power, which did not make his views popular in Berkeley. His office was in Etcheverry Hall at UCB in the department of nuclear engineering. Under the grass next to his office was a research nuclear reactor. Berkeley, which became a “nuclear free zone”, had a nuclear reactor under a volley ball court. My father was chair of radiation safety and thought that was reasonable. The problem is Berkeley apparently, didn’t. The Berkeley city council wanted the city to be a “nuclear free zone” and having a nuclear reactor in the middle of the UCB Campus, precluded that concept. So, the university was supposed to move the reactor out of Berkeley. The only problem is that to move the reactor, you have to actually physically move it, and the Berkeley city council didn’t want to issue a permit to transport a nuclear reactor through the streets of Berkeley. It was exactly the kind of thing my father enjoyed. “You don’t want a nuclear reactor in the middle of Berkeley?  OK, we will move it. You have to give us the permit to move it. If you don’t give us the permit to move it, we won’t, and it will still be there, in Berkeley, in the nuclear free zone, which isn’t nuclear free. Sorry.” He spent a lot of time speaking to people who didn’t feel warm and fuzzy about nuclear stuff.

Child playing with sand, if it was radioactive sand, it would still be ok, probably healthier really.

But he truly enjoyed it. He would shock people. The first approach was to take something truly terrifying to most people and use it as an example to show that what people were afraid of either wasn’t that dangerous, or was not really a big deal. When discussing radioactive waste his favorite examples started out something like this. “So, if we take a kilogram of plutonium dust and we spread it around a grade school play ground. What would be the effect?” The audience was so taken aback that they didn’t notice that he had then defused their fear with fact. Frequently the example involved children, or eating the material, or spreading it on a play ground. “No, having tritium on the eucalyptus leaves behind the lab is not a problem. No one eats eucalyptus leaves. There are no Koala bears in Berkeley. It is not a problem.”  “No, nuclear weapons are not going to be used to destroy the world, it is way, way too expensive.” “Or, don’t worry about the North Koreans. If they actually made a bomb, it would have to be in a large container, which they would put on a ship, and there would be 20 North Korean Scientists with the bomb, when they brought the ship into San Francisco bay to set it off. You would notice the 20 North Koreans shopping in Macy’s in their white lab coats, wouldn’t be a problem. Nuclear weapons, not that dangerous, really.” Other kids were worried about bomb shelters, or the Russians and nuclear weapons, my dad, not worried at all, “our house was built just beyond the blast line. Not a problem.” When Osama Bin Laden started gaining notoriety and people worried about weapons of mass destruction, my dad was very sanguine. “Not a problem. If we gave him the design, and we gave him the plutonium, he couldn’t make it work. Earnest Lawrence, and his staff could make it work, but Osama Bin Laden in a cave? Not going to happen, just doing the lathe work would light it on fire and kill them all. Don’t worry.   Nuclear weapons, not a problem.

Tropical Paradise of Enewetak

At one point after he built a home computer with a soldering iron, he brought home a program that displayed the temperature and dose from a nuclear blast at different distances from the blast site. “See, it is not a problem. Once you are a couple of miles away, it’s just heat.” The temperatures looked a bit high to a high school student but he was my dad and he said, not a problem. Besides its “too expensive to destroy the world with nuclear weapons.” We had a very, very large clam shell in the back yard, it was about two feet across that my dad brought from the Enewetak Atoll where he had gone to see a test shot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enewetak_Atoll#Operation_Sandstone). I don’t think it was any larger than a normal clam shell from the Marshalls, but to a kid it looked like the Godzilla of mollusks. “Radiation, not a problem, makes you heathier, you know Hormesis.” He had been to India to study the people living on the radioactive sand, he had done the studies, but it certainly worried the non-techically sophisticated. 

At one point my dad brought home a wonderful report called project plow share. It was an analysis of the use of nuclear “devices”, they weren’t weapons, they were devices, to do civil engineering. They wanted to build a sea level canal across Nicaragua as a new Panama Canal. The Panama Canal took decades to build and requires locks. People moved in to the jungle to dig the canal, thousands died of tropical diseases, started towns, and now you have a country where there was only jungle; terrible environmental damage from all the construction work. So, in project plow share you avoid all that environmental damage. You send in a helicopter with a drill rig. Drill a well every half mile or so. Place a nuclear device, not a bomb, a device, in each well. You set off them simultaneously blowing a half mile wide, sea level, canal. A week or so later you send in a bull dozer to smooth out any missed dirt. Then blow the two ends filling the canal with water. Presto, a half mile wide, sea level canal, built in a millisecond, with surprisingly little environmental damage, None really. The fact that you just set off 100 nuclear weapons near surface didn’t bother him one bit. Not a problem.  The other project plowshare study was of building a new harbor in Australia. Drill some wells, plant some devices, blamo, new harbor, and minimal radiation dose, because the water in the harbor shields the people who then “live” there.

My dad really enjoyed stirring up people at parties. He would say something that was technically absolutely true, only politically incorrect. Nuclear power is the most environmentally sensitive form of power and safest. It’s the only choice. Let’s take coal, the deaths per mega, mega watt or some such number were 300, oil was 150, nuclear 1, and that was from mining accidents from uranium. Worker injured by bull dozer or truck. Which is safer, invading a middle eastern country to get oil? Coating all the baby harp seals with oil? Or building a clean, safe, environmentally safe nuclear power plant? Global warming from oil and coal, or clean, safe, environmentally safe nuclear power? You can see how we were extremely popular in Berkeley. The facts were correct, just not politically correct. “People have certain ways that are acceptable to die. It is acceptable to die from a motorcycle, or a car accident, or being gored by a bull in Pamplona, but a nuclear accident, not acceptable.” When people were afraid of having fluoride added to the water supply, my dad bought a bottle of fluoride tablets to hand out to us every day. “Vitamins, worthless, here have a fluoride tablet, they protect your teeth.”  He wanted to start a society of people who were afraid of halogens such as fluoride. 

When conservation came in he was all for it. The only problem was he worried about conserving truly rare stuff, not paper, or plastic, or endangered species. He wanted to conserve helium. “Helium, extremely important stuff, very hard and expensive to make.” If you release a helium balloon the helium atoms leave the earth’s atmosphere never to return.  He wouldn’t allow us to have helium filled balloons because they were a waste of helium, which if you didn’t know is useful in heliarc welding (aluminum), as a diving gas, medical gas, and for blimps. Here we were driving cars that got 12 miles to the gallon, worrying about conserving helium because when it is released into the atmosphere, it escapes into space, and is lost. Note to self, helium is really expensive to make, better conserve it.

 Now one of the major problems with physicists is that their science is extremely quantitative. There are physical theories or processes that are good to 8 or 10 decimal places. The standard model  which explains all of particle physics except gravity is good to 12 decimal places.  Physics theories are constructed that are accurate to many decimal places. Physicists do science where they make up a law. One can challenge a law, but do you really want to challenge the LAW of GRAVITY. As the saying goes the Law of Gravity is strictly enforced. Non-physical science and medicine, are less qauantitative, and less certain. For example, Sigmund Freud did not write the LAW of PSYCHOTHERAPY. He developed the theory of psychotherapy. Let’s see, everything that is longer than it is wide is phallic, the only thing that is not longer than it is wide is  sphere, spheres are phallic. This type of theory is not good to 12 decimal places.  There are few things in medicine that work at p=0.05, which means that 95 times out of 100, you are correct. Alternatively, 5% of the time you are wrong.  When a physicists looks at a medical or biologic problem, they think it is like a physics study, were statistics weren’t needed because the problem was correct to 1:10¹². Nothing in medicine is good to 1:10¹².  My father thought that medical, surgical, and especially psychiatry to accurate, like physics.  Dad, it is a theory, it is not a fact. 40% of people with problem X,  fart. Yes, there is an association, it is just not good to 1:10¹².  My dad would believe the psychiatry lectures he heard were true, and not just true, but true at 1:10¹². Oedipus loved his mother, but one must remember, that unlike physics, sometimes it isn’t fundamentally true.   He had a hard time separating the limited accuracy of biology and medical science and took much of it to be True, with a capital T.

There were some things is physics he had trouble with. We would talk about cosmology frequently. Ok, I get the idea that the universe is expanding. I get that energy and mass are the same thing with E=mc². I understand why the sky is black and the red shift, and that it all started with a big bang, my simple question is where did all the stuff in the big bang come from? If energy and mass are convertible, where did all the energy come from? If there is conservation of energy, where did it come from in the first place? He would use Einstein’s out. If you can’t do an experiment to test it, it isn’t a meaningful question. Ok, I am ok with that, let’s do a thought experiment. There is infinite time and space. Out of the quantum vacuum, every once in a while two particles pop out, one matter, one anti-matter, and then they anilate. I am ok, with that. Lots of time, lots of space, rare event, fine. How did you get more matter here, where is all the anti-matter? If it anilated, where is the light from the anilation? . If you can’t do an experiment to test it, it isn’t a meaningful question. Ok, I’ve got a question. If there were a particle that popped out of the quantum vacuum today, could you tell it wasn’t from the particles in the big bang? How different would it look, would it be moving in a weird direction, speed? We would then discuss how cosmic rays, pronounced comic rays, looked like this, very high speed, very high energy, but most likely given energy and weird directions by collisions with stars, not some post big bang process. Supposed, we give you the quantum vacuum particle popping theory, and we ignore the imbalance problem giving us more matter than anti-matter, and we get it to condense into one giant ball, why didn’t it become a black hole? Why did it go boom? Rather than just remain the largest black hole ever? Are there black holes that are so big they explode? What process would make a black hole explode?  Ah there was silence. If you can’t do an experiment to test it, it isn’t a meaningful question. Well, if the black hole was large enough, and there is conservation of angular momentum, would the out edge approach the speed of light and be limited by the speed of light setting up some problem that would cause it to explode like a giant spinning glob?  We would go around and around on these questions. Ok, if all these particles condensed into the big bang, was it rotating, if it was rotating, prior to the big bang, could we see the rotation? “No reference frame, can’t see the rotation,  If you can’t do an experiment to test it, it isn’t a meaningful question.” I will miss my lessons in cosmology, I hope to someday understand where all the stuff came from. His theory, which was always depressing, “it was always here. Why did it need a beginning?” We could have a three hour conversation about gravitons, you know, the government wouldn’t fund the study on gravitons. More people die of gravitational radiation poisoning than any other type of radiation injury. They won’t fund it.

When Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons gave their press release about Cold Fusion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion) my dad was fascinated. His first reaction was nope. Too little energy and they don’t understand neutron detection. He had spent years talking about Fusion, how it was extremely hard to do. How Fusion was always just 30 years off. In 1950, it was 30 years off, in 2010, is it just 30  years off. He also subscribed to the theory that there is limited money in the Universe. If one project sucks all the physics dollars into one corner, they can’t be used somewhere else. There is conservation of energy, mass, and money. The “Hot” fusion people had sucked up all the money for a long time, he liked the idea that they could be shown to be wrong by the “cold” fusion people. He followed the palladium story, and went to meetings discussing cold fusion. His summary was usually something like, there is something weird that happens at the surface of palladium, they don’t get enough neutrons, they don’t know how to detect a neutron, isn’t that fascinating. I think he wanted the hot fusion people to be shown up by the cold fusion people, rather than actually believing Pons and Fleischman, but we did get to hear a lot about the surface chemistry of palladium. “They are chemists they never calibrate anything, and they don’t know how to detect a neutron.” My dad divided people by profession. Chemists would write on note books. They would go into the lab and do an experiment. Physicists would write on envelopes. They go into a lab and calibrate stuff, and then calibrate some more, and after a couple of months of calibration, they would do an experiment. Medical doctors? They just told you what they thought.

Chemists, they don't calibrate, and they can't detect a neutron.

My dad had all kinds of theories. He read a book on left handedness (The Left-Hander Syndrome: The Causes and Consequences of Left-Handedness by Stanley Coren). He applied the logic of a physicists that thinks things are true to 1:10¹², and we got to hear this theory for a year. When he read a book about the alphabet, we got to hear that theory for a while. The biggest change occurred when he moved to Canada. All through my child hood, I heard how dysfunctional our government was. When it took a couple of years to toss out Richard Nixon, we heard how wonderful a prime mister was. They just loose a vote of confidence and they are done. It seemed like America was going to fail because we could toss the criminals out with a no confidence vote. When he moved to Canada, he would watch the parliament, I guess on the Canadian equivalent of C-Span.. He watched the British Prime Minister’s weekly question and answer session in Parliament with great reverence. The U.S., we are going to fail, because we can’t toss them out. “But Dad, what about Italy, they have a Parliament, they toss out their government every few months, they are unstable.” “Very simple, if the entire parliament has to stand for election with a vote of no confidence, then it is stable. If is just the prime minister and cabinet, it is not.” He always had an answer.

He loved the metric system. U.S. not going to succeed cause we are the last country on earth that doesn’t have the metric system. We had one other country on our side, Sri Lanka, but they decided to switch, now we are alone. You know, if we had a parliament, we could have a no confidence vote, and toss them out. I used to tell people that he was so embarrassed by George Bush 2, that he moved to Canada, it probably was partially correct, oh, yeah and the draw of C-SPAN Canada with the parliament. 

Kiroshi, Scurvy, and Lunch

Kiroshi, Scurvy, and Lunch

Karōshi (過労死^?), which can be translated literally from Japanese as "death from overwork", is occupational sudden death. The first case of karōshi was reported in 1969 with the death from a stroke of a 29-year-old male worker in the shipping department of Japan's largest newspaper company.  In 1987, as public concern increased, the Japanese Ministry of Labour began to publish statistics on karōshi. My father, Roger Wallace, recognized an imminent health threat when he saw one. He had spent his entire life dedicated to avoiding Karoshi, but he now had a name, and a diagnosis, and a cause. Now, normally when someone becomes concerned about a public health threat to a nation, there are telethons, or walks, or fund raisers, or public service messages, or research into the causes, prevention, and treatment of this new scourge on a community or a nation. My father, Roger Wallace, decided to handle the threat, the scourge, the public health menace of Karoshi, by eating lunch. Yes, it was a hard battle against a terrible threat, so he did it regularly, daily even. Every once in a while my dad would need help with some task such as cleaning out the attic, or storage, or building something like a fence, drainage ditch, whatever. He would call me up and we would discuss the details of the project. I would be briefed on the logistics. Plans would be drawn up, a schedule, time table, and a date set for the task. In his later years, schedules would be typed up, edited, emailed, then discussed, and revised. When the appointed day for the task arrived, I would get up early, usually around five am, shower, drive over to Orinda, and my dad would be eating breakfast, usually a sweet roll heated in the microwave oven and orange juice, Marjorie would be drinking a pot of tea with four tea bags. We would go over the schedule, logistics, then my dad would realize it was time for lunch. Well, not quite time, but soon, it would soon be time for lunch. So, let’s go to lunch right now. We’ll, beat the rush.

So, we go to lunch. Karoshi, you must fight against Karoshi. Now lunch was a prolonged process. When I am working on a project. I work, and work, and work, and then later in the afternoon when I am truly starving, I will get some fast food, and a diet coke,  scarf it down, wash my hands, and get back to the task at hand.  The major goal being alleviation of hunger and thirst. My dad on the other hand was fighting two major health care scourges in Northern California, Karoshi, death from overwork, and Scurvy, an 18^th century blight on the British Navy from lack of Vitamin C. You see, the Romans fought scurvy by drinking vinegar. It was my opinion that Roman soldiers really wanted to drink wine, but the storage containers weren’t air tight, so they had some vinegar, and the officers just didn’t want to waste “wine”, really, it is good for you, it will fight scurvy. Trust me. I’m an officer. The British Navy fought scurvy with limes, giving their nation the ethnic slur of Limey. My father fought against scurvy every day of his life with lemons in iced tea. Many, many lemon slices, carefully squeezed over the years into gallons of iced tea. It was a noble battle against an 18^th century scourge that he fought well into his 90’s in the 21^st century. Waiters throughout the San Francisco bay area were his soldiers in this battle. “Could I have some more lemon wedges and saccharine?”  He couldn’t say, sweet and low, or those little pink packages, it was saccharine. He had a little bottle of saccharine tablets prior to the days of sweet and low at every table. He looked like some sort of spy poisoning himself when he dropped the saccharine tablets into the tea. It was a great relief when sweet and low was available at every table in every restaurant. I was always surprised he didn’t say benzoic sulfimide or ortho sulphobenzamide, but he was trying to be helpful to the wait staff with saccharine.

Lemons, fighting scurvy one slice at a time.

So, we would eat lunch. Now my dad was on a “diet” most of his adult life. He took it extremely seriously. He weighed himself every day and plotted the Gravity Variations at 36 Las Vegas Road, Orinda California quite dutifully. He lost hundreds of pounds, all between 185 and 180 pounds. He was extremely careful with what he ate. For example, bread; bread was full of calories. When a restaurant provided say cheese toast. You know that toasted French bread with a layer of cheese, garlic, and butter toasted on the surface, he would carefully remove the “bread” layer and eat just the cheese layer. “Bread has a lot of calories you know.” When asked about this practice he was quite clear. “Haven’t eaten a piece of bread in years, maybe a decade.” “What about that piece of cheese toast.” “Didn’t eat the bread, it has a lot of calories you know.” Chocolate cake, sort of like bread but better? “Doesn’t count. It is not bread. Bread has a lot of calories you know.”

The other thing that is important to realize is that bread is flat. It is a topologic structure not a food based on grain that rises and is cooked. For example, muffins are not bread, they are not flat, they are spheroids, therefore they are not bread. Cake, cake comes in slices that taper to a sharp edge, not flat, therefore not bread. These concepts came clearly into focus in certain restaurants. Max’s Opera Café was a typical example. Max’s has wonderful rolls that come with dinner. They are warm, come in many flavors, some even have raisons. Rolls are not bread for two reasons. The first is they are not flat. The second is simply that it has raisons, and therefore is not a “bread”. When one eats a rolls of this type there is an official way to do it that must be followed. The first task is to straighten the tines on the fork. Forks, in restaurants, have tines that are not perfectly aligned. One must take out the dinner knife and straighten the tines so they are all perfectly aligned. The fork is held carefully in the hand with the index finger on the tine end of the fork and the tines, then used to puncture the rolls along the equator. The fork is then used to demarcate the equator of the rolls until it is separated in two. Butter is then smeared on the roll  and it is eaten. The next, and this may be even more important, additional rolls, with raisons, are requested from the waiter for others at the table who must have a roll with raisons. Moreover, the next step is to explain to the others at the table, no matter what their age or maturity, both how to use a fork, and how to puncture a roll around the equator to separate it into two halves. But a roll is not bread. “Haven’t eaten bread in more than a decade.”

To understand these concepts one must remember that my dad worked on anti-matter in graduate school and as a particle physicist. Anti-matter is matter that is like normal matter but exactly opposite. So, instead of an electron, one gets a positron. Positrons are just like electrons only with a positive charge.  When matter and anti-matter come in contact, they are obliviated in a burst of energy, and two photons are emitted in equal and opposite directions. My dad worked on the antiproton. So, when it came to dieting, my dad worried a lot about antimatter. For example, examples are always good in these discussions. You have heard of empty calories? Empty calories are extremely dangerous and need to be neutralized by being filled up with regular calories. So, ice cream, full of empty calories right? That’s why you need chocolate sauce to fill up the empty calories in the ice cream. My dad was just concerned for your health and safety. 

The other thing about restaurants, and this was more an issue when we were younger and there were buffets. You want to get your money’s worth. We went to a number of buffets as a kid. The Fairmont with its rotating restaurant on top of the hotel was especially popular but the Clairmont was also good. The Marriot in Berkeley was excellent. When you go to a buffet, you need to only eat expensive stuff. No lettuce, no pasta, no vegetables, they are cheep you can get them at home. Shrimp, lobster, fillet mignon, dessert. No jello. I don’t care if you want jello, you can have that at home, eat an éclair. When we went on cruises, it was the same, only the buffet was 24/7 and lasted for a week, then two weeks, then a month. You can see how theories of empty calories and bread poisoning can be helpful in these matters.

Now one must consider the reality of the cost of eating in restaurants. The simple fact, according to my father, is it is much cheaper to eat in a restaurant than to eat at home; much cheaper. Very simple math, here. To eat in a restaurant you enter the restaurant, order food, eat it, and pay. It is very simple indeed. When you eat at home, first you are making $250 an hour. So you go to the grocery store and you buy a basket of groceries for $250. You spent an hour buying the groceries so those groceries cost $500. Now you cook a meal, that takes an hour, you eat the meal, another hour, you clean up from the meal, that is another hour. So, the meal at home took four hours at $250 an hour added to the cost of the groceries, that simple meal at home cost $1,250! The restaurant meal was $50, a bargain at twice the price. You can’t afford to eat at home. Now, cruises, cruises save money. You get on the cruise at $100 a day per person, you are there for a month. That is only $3000 a month per person, you could easily spend that eating three meals at home in one day. Cruising is way, way cheaper than being at home. The longer the cruise, the more money I am saving. Oh, I am also fighting Karoshi, have you ever heard of someone dying of Karoshi on a cruise? I think not.

When our kids were small, and my Dad and Marjorie were not on a cruise, they would baby sit our kids. My dad did this for my brother’s kids, Scott and Katherine, as well. He was a very dedicated baby sitter but it was extremely expensive. My dad would show up in his white general motors car, unload the multiple computers in their little nylon zipper cases, cover the dining room table with computers, and then proceed to explain how expensive it was to baby sit the grand children. You see, we drove here from Orinda which is a total of 33 miles, which without traffic takes 41 minutes. With traffic, it takes an hour, which at $250 an hour is $500 dollars to get here and return to Orinda. We baby sat for four hours, that is another $1000. So, this dinner and a movie you went to cost us $1,500. I am not sure we can afford to baby sit. The costs of baby sitting were not really that small. My dad would sit at my computer and surf the internet. When he found something of interest he would print the page in color on our ink jet printer. By the end of an evening there would be a one inch think pile of color print outs of web sites, and a completely empty set of ink jet cartridges. I gave him a number of zip drives and thumb drives hoping he would stop the color printing and just save the page. “Oh, no this is simpler when I print. Thanks.”  The ultimate cost estimate was when Doonesbury published the strips of one of the character’s father giving him the bill for his childhood. My father thought this was a tremendous idea and kept at it. The bills got larger and larger and somehow I never had the money after paying the $250 an hour it cost to eat dinner, to pay the guy. One time when I was in college he called me late at night. I woke up to a question. “Are you going to all your classes?” “Yes, why do you ask?” “Well, I was calculating and realized that since you are taking five classes, three classes a week, and hour a piece, for a semester. Those classes each cost more than a box seat at the opera. Make sure you don’t miss one.” “Thanks dad, put it on my tab.”

So, while the guy drove $1000 used white general motors cars until their engines no longer held oil, and straightened the tines of forks at restaurants, and never bothered to charge for his time, or efforts in the computer world, he did generate a bill for my childhood, baby sitting his grandchildren, and even eating a meal in my house. “You know it’s time for dinner, we should go to a restaurant, this meal at home is costing us thousands of dollars.

Wallace and the Beagle

Wallace and the Beagle

My dad, Roger Wallace, had a very great fondness for dogs, small dogs mostly, but all dogs. He had a terrier as a child who dug out of the yard and was killed by a car. I don’t at this point in time remember the dog’s name, but I heard the story many times. The pain of his childhood loss was still fresh half a century later. When my mom and dad got married they moved into a small house in El Sobrante California, a small town to the east of San Francisco on highway 80 towards Sacramento. They were married for ten years prior to starting a family. My mom worked as a teacher, went to graduate school in history, and my dad was in graduate school working on his Ph.D. in physics. All the while they had dogs, as my dad would say, to practice for the children to come. Dogs were another member of the family and in this early case, a substitute for babies and children. It was an openly specified substitution. 

The first dog I remember as a child was a cocker spaniel named Muffin. Muffin had a few freckles on her belly that reminded me of a blue berry muffin. At one point she was stung by a bee on the belly, my dad pulled the singer from her soft underbelly as she lay there in pain from the sting. She also had a tendency to protect her food when she ate. As a very young child I knew this tendency. I would enter the kitchen and creep with my back to the wall whenever muffin was eating dinner. If she would see me, she would attack. Many times I was picked up crying, bleeding from a dog bite, and taken to my parent’s bathroom for a dog bite wash out. Muffin eventually was given to a nice childless, single lady a block from the house. Muffin no longer was able to bite me on a routine basis. 

My dad then got a gray miniature poodle named Brigitte after Brigitte Bardo. My dad very much liked French movie actresses, so our dog was named after one. Brigitte was a good dog. She would play fetch with a tennis ball indefinitely. One time my brother and I took turns throwing the tennis ball to see when she would tire and give up the game of fetch. Three hours later Brigitte was still going strong, Doug and I on the other hand, were exhausted. When we would go to Donner lake and stay on the lake front, Brigette would play water catch essentially indefinitely. You could throw the ball as far into the water as you wanted and she would return it. When you tired of the game, Brigette would drop the ball on the pathway to the lake. The ball would roll down hill, across the dock, and then fall into the cold lake water. Brigitte would then jump from the dock and retrieve the ball. She had created her own tennis ball machine using the path, dock, lake, and gravity. 

Brigitte Bardo, the movie actress, not our dog.

At first my dad thought that a French poodle should have a French Poodle hair cut. He got caulk, and a hair cutter. We would draw out the saddle pattern on the dog with a French curve, and he would trim the dog like you see in the movies. This only happened a few times and then the kids were assigned the job of clipping the dog. Needless to say, the French curve was gone, the dog was shaved like a lamb. The dog needed dignity not some poofy hair cut. My dad bred Brigette a number of times and we raised puppies. Many went to friends, some to the Maiden Lane Pet store in San Francisco. One was adopted by Hans Mark, one of my dad’s friends and later the Secretary of the Air Force and a Deputy Administrator of NASA. Hans’ dog would jump off the diving board into their pool to swim. We kept one of the puppies and named her Coco, after Coco Chanel. I am not sure how these French women would feel about having our dog named after them, but my dad was very clear, dogs got human names. The dog would be insulted if it got a “dog” name.

Coco Chanel, also not our dog.

In 1963 the movie Tom Jones came out. It is an adaptation of Henry Fielding's classic novel The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), starring Albert Finney as the titular hero and was one of the most critically acclaimed and popular comedies of its time,^[1] winning four Academy Awards. Tom Jones fundamentally changed my dad’s view of dogs. Tom is a bawdy English “gentleman” but at one point he is injured. According to my father’s often told rendition, he is brought into a dining room where a number of people are eating. Dogs are sitting at the table eating as well. The food is pushed off the table onto the floor and Tom is laid down on the table to be treated. The dogs continue to eat from the floor. This one scene provided the basis for Wallace dogs eating at the table. Besides, if they are sitting at the table, the don’t beg, according to my father. It is amazingly easy to train a dog to sit in a chair, at the dinner table, and eat from a plate. It was one of the very few things my dad ever taught a dog.

Tom Jones the Movie, you can see the appeal to my father.

In middle school, I got the idea that a Siberian husky was a good dog. We searched out Siberian husky breeders. We went to a sled dog race up at Tahoe. That was wonderful, lots of dogs running in the snow. We adopted a puppy named and named her Natasha. She was the first large dog we had had. I took her to dog school, and trained her. When she went into heat, she got out, and ran the neighborhood doing was dogs do. My dad took her in to the vet to get the morning after shot. The next day she got into a fight with Coco and killed her. My dad took Natasha to the vet and put her down. We lost two dogs that day. 

A while later, I was sitting in my best friend;s custom van in Rockridge Oakland, Roger Van Maren. Roger was the son of a gynecologic surgeon. They had everything, absolutely everything including: an airplane, open ocean fishing boat, street motorcycles (3), minibikes (4), off road motorcycles (3), guns, a pool with an inflatable dome, a tennis court, pong machine, custom van, custom cars, gold lame tuxedos, scuba equipment (3), etc. And when I say scuba equipment for example, they had the tanks, regulators, etc. but then they had the plastic housings for the tanks like Jacques Cousteau, as well as the underwater motorized torpedoes like James Bond. The Van Marens had everything. They had the first microwave oven and digital clock anyone had ever seen. They also had a wonderful great dane named Countess. She had her own freezer for dog food. Well, we were sitting in Roger’s driveway in the custom van getting ready for some trip. This van had TV, cassette, 8 track, a winch, a custom paint job. It was a $25,000 custom van in the days when a van cost $4000. This little beagle like dog jumped into the front seat. We looked at her tag. Phineas had a tag from Madison Wisconsin. Well, we were 2,088 miles from Madison Wisconsin. Phineas was an extremely nice dog. We called the number on the tag, but didn’t get an answer, and then we wrote a letter, yes in those days there was no email, this was a physical letter to an address in Madison. A month or so later, a graduate student couple showed up who were Phineas’s owners. They took the dog for a day or so and then brought her back saying they really couldn’t take care of her in Berkeley. So, we had a new dog!

The problem, according to my dad, was Phineas was a male name, and Phineas, the dog was female. Gender confusion was a very serious worry of my father, and you know, the dog, might, well, it is insulting to the dog to have a male’s name. The dog was renamed Lucy, after Charlie Brown’s nemesis in Peanuts, and I spent more time in dog school. Lucy, while an extremely nice dog, and a mix of beagle, and I think a bit of golden retriever, looked like a beagle but with a thinner snout. She was not a good student at dog school. We went to the John F Kennedy University in Orinda California for dog school. Lucy is the only graduate I know of this fine university, and she was held back several times for “sniffing”. Apparently in obedience school, dogs are not supposed to sniff the ground while walking. Beagles sniff, we worked on this problem for a long time, and she eventually graduated, but it was a problem.

Lucy's Alma Mater

The Greek god, Phineas, note, the god is male, which would cause gender confusion and be insulting to the dog, who was neither Greek, nor a god, nor male. 

Lucy was a nice enough dog that my dad shifted from poodle enthusiast with French movie actress names, to Beagles, with American Movie actress names. The problem with beagles is they actually are hard to train and my dad never bothered to train any of them. Lucy, was not a pure beagle, she was a beagle mix, and I trained her. His next beagle was a rescue beagle named Pamela who was untrained, and never listened to any command, let alone, go outside to use the bathroom, but I digress. My dad would faithfully bring Pamela with him whenever he visited. Unfortunately, if Pamela shot out a door, getting her to come back was a major undertaking. The word COME, was not in Pamela’s vocabulary. House breaking was never accomplished. For a guy who insisted dogs should have gender appropriate human names, sit at the table, and travel with you at all times, he really didn’t train them.

When Alfia was pregnant with our first child, we purchased a house in San Rafael. It was a wonderful house with a back yard and I wanted a dog. My office mate, Gretchen Hollingsworth also wanted a dog. I had had a black Labrador in medical school named Kobi. Kobi, named after Kobi beef, was adopted after Linnaea found her hit by a car. She had been “tenderized” by a car, she would be named Kobi. Not a classic Roger Wallace naming system, but I digress. So, I wanted a black Labrador. Gretchen knew of a litter of free puppies from a very nice dog named Dinette in Corte Madera. The dog was a local legend for being nice and was “huge” like a Dinette set. The owner of the dog managed a night club in San Francisco and two of the puppies from the litter of 14 went to Robin Williams. If they puppies were good enough for him, we wanted one. So Alfia, who was now two days from delivery and in no capacity to object to a puppy, and I went to Corte Madera to pick up a free puppy. We picked an all black one and Gretchen picked second and got a brindle dog that eventually looked like a hyena. Jenny, the black mastiff-lab mix eventually weighed 150 lbs and was about the size of a great dane. She looked liked a black lab that just kept growing, and growing. Maggie, Gretchen’s dog was similar in size but brindle. When the two played together they looked like something from the lair of a James Bond Villian. 

Well Jenny spent 18 months in dog school, and while being a very slow learner, was perfectly behaved. At one point in dog school, a black lab like dog ran underneath Jenny, using her as an overpass. I asked the owner what type of dog had just done this. Oh, a black lab. “How did your black lab run under my black lab?” “Mister, that isn’t a black lab.” I hadn’t noticed how large she was. Jenny knew about 30 words and never had any accidents. You could give commands in sentences such as “Jenny, go into the kichen and lie down on your bed.” “Jenny, back up.” Jenny was not a rocket scientist, and her CPU ran slow, but my dad’s dog was another story. Our house has wooden floors in much of it. On the top floor, the former owners had covered the wood floors with vile 1960’s carpeting. We tore it out to find wood floors, which we had resurfaced. This resurfacing required us to live in a hotel for a week and suffer through saw dust, and sanding, etc. So, the floors were perfect. They were done! Something came up and Alfia had to fly to Florida to take care of her dad, I had to fly somewhere for a business trip. We were both gone at the same time. My dad and Marjorie decided to stay in our house, and baby sit the kids. I came back after two days. There was Andrew, who was just walking, but he was all wet. I picked him up only to realize he had fallen in a puddle of dog urine. I cleaned him up. I then proceeded to find 15 “accidents” on my brand new floors and carpeting from Pamela. We had only been gone 48 hours, what had they been feeding this dog? Moreover, we had a dog door that a 150 pound mastador could use, and a beagle couldn’t find its way outside? Pamela was banned from our house. 

When my dad met Gretchen McDonald, she had a number of Maltese mixes. These dogs also had human names like Harry, when my dad named them, or Giggs, when they were named prior to my dad’s influence. They were smart enough to come, sit, and stay out of the road. Pamela, my dad’s beagle, wasn’t smart enough to stay off of the Trans Canada Highway, and met a tragic, but completely expected end. I never quite figured out why my dad never trained the dogs, we always had a dog door. We always had dogs, but he just didn’t feel the need to train them. My dad was an enormous advocate for education. He read, studied, tutored, and lectured. He sent people to medical school, and graduate school. He sent me to dog obedience school a number of times with a number of dogs. Dogs ate at the dining room table, lived in the house, had human gender appropriate names, but he didn’t bother to train them.

Electronics and the Bald Eagle

Electronics and the Bald Eagle

My dad had a great fondness for technology. In high school he built a camera. It is made of wood and has the large bellows and glass plates, with a cloth you cover your head, just like in the old movies. Not a pocket camera, but the shutter, a rolling window shade like device, still works. When I was a kid he had a large collection of half-frame cameras. Normal single lens reflex cameras put 24 or 36 images on a roll of film. A half frame camera makes the images half as large and puts 72 images on a 36 exposure roll with half the resolution. My father loved these cameras because you can take twice as many images per roll. The other way to look at it is they have half the resolution. Well for a guy who wore trifocals, resolution, who needs resolution. My father took tens of thousands of photos with these low resolution cameras all with the appeal of bank security camera clarity.

When the astronauts were going to the moon, they took large frame Hasselblad cameras and we got stunning images of the moon, if my dad had been in charge, and he said this a number of times, they would have stuck with the half-frame camera, saved on film, and we would have images only a police detective would find useful.

He was always into taking movies. He had a 16 mm camera and projector. He had 8 mm movies and finally super 8 movies. I remember watching him splice the movie film together with his splicer and little pieces of tape with sprocket holes. As a kid, he let us make movies, of course they had to be short as the film cost a couple of dollars a minute, but I made a 5 minute silent monster classic entitled, I am curiously green. It led to many future Halloween costumes, but never was picked up for distribution by a major studio. He had a movie light which was so bright and so hot that one could light paper on fire by shining it at it. As I kid we tested this fascinating pyrotechnic technique many times. It made great movies but left white spots in your field of view. “Smile” “I can’t see.” “Smile” “Where are you?” “Smile at the camera.” I know how Miss America must feel, mechanical smile, but no ability to see from the lights.

When video cameras came in, he was right in line. On our trip around the United States in 1966 we had extensive discussions of why we couldn’t have TV in the car. My dad was of course thinking about receiving the signal with an antennae. “TV signals are line of sight. It will never work.” We even thought of getting an aerodynamic antennae like in an airplane. In the six weeks it took to circumnavigate the entire United States stopping at every tourist spot and a bathroom stop every hour or so, we had lots of time to discuss TV reception and line of sight transmission. Every Christmas we would make an annual pilgrimage to San Francisco to see the stores around Union Square. We would go to Macy’s, and the Maiden Lane Pet store, where a cute, fluffy, mixed breed puppy would go for $300 in 1960’s money. I am sitting next to my own mixed ancestry mastador, so I must be careful not to say mutt. We would go to Dunhill’s tobacco shop to ask for empty cigar boxes, they were made of mahogany and provided excellent, although tobacco scented wood, for making things. FAO Swartz was on the list as was the City of Paris with its wonderful multistory Christmas tree in the foyer of the building. But there was Abercrombie & Fitch. Abercrombie & Fitch was not as it is now, a fashion house for young people. It was a store that sold weird stuff and hunting clothes to the fabulously rich. Sort of like Sharper Image for billionaires. They had leather, full sized, rhinoceroses. They had clothes to wear on Safari. They had golf balls with radio receivers in them so you couldn’t loose your ball. They had a video tape recorder for sale. It was so unique, and expensive, that it was in the front window of the store. Betsy, my sister wanted one for the car. There were a number of problems with this idea. First, it was really expensive and secondly it required 120 volt power. Third, televisions of the time had tubes, which required lots of power. Needless to say, in 1966, my father was willing to have a weeks long discussion of how we couldn’t have TV in the car, but the issues, were not “Because I said so.” They were “Because TV signals are line of sight.” The issues were always taken back to the physics.

Now, I must admit that many of the things my father said were impossible, have come to pass. I thought highly of Dick Tracy’s wrist watch TV phone. Which according to my father, was “IMPOSSIBLE”. When I was a kid building radio control airplanes trying to start glow motors, I asked about the possibility of electric flight. “It is impossible, because of power to weight.” We had long discussions of having phones in every car. “It is impossible, because of band width restrictions.” Video image transmission for the masses, IMPOSSIBLE. So while my dad was a very, very smart guy, and understood physics, and gave physics explanations for problems, he rarely understood how sneaky electrical engineers find some technological way to cheat. He loved electronics, but he didn’t expect them to violate the laws of physics by some cleaver work around.

He really got into video cameras. He would video tape everything. He video taped television, movies, lectures, dinner. We had thousands of VHS video tapes in the house. There was just one problem. While he video taped things without the commercials, that was nice before Tiveo and digital recording, but he did it at the lowest resolution possible, to save on video tape. He used a morass of wires and switches that the dog slept on. Now while I really liked the dog, it does not lead to high fidelity tapes that one would like to watch again. Fuzzy dogs sitting on morasses of wires make fuzzy video tapes. But don’t worry, we will have a lot of them. He would video tape entire cruises without stopping. He video taped meals. When he went to a wedding he would set up the video camera on a tripod in the corner, plug in the camera to wall power, and run it for five hours in one direction. I have watched more compelling bank security camera footage. He would then want to replay it, unedited, to show you the event. I at one point suggested that he call up the police and see if he could get a contract for providing videos that would just bore people into confessing. “Oh, officer, I did it. I did it. Just turn off that video tape of the food line at what’s her name’s wedding. Please, I beg you.”

When Alfia and I got married my dad carefully instructed the videographer to not ever turn off the camera and not move at all during the wedding. The only part of the tape that was useful was when the videographer caught the minister having a mental break down during the actual wedding ceremony. “Do you take this man to be your.. Who sent you?” “Marshal McCuen, sent me” “You have destroyed the sanctity of this marriage” “Oh get on with it.” The minister decompensated and ran from the ceremony in her purple cowboy boots, the video was unedited, and unwatched, but not to worry, it was low resolution.

The cameras, and video cameras, and digital cameras, and computers multiplied, and multiplied. Each device needed a little zipper bag to live in, and it needed to have back up. My dad would come over to our house to baby sit. He would unload the devices, two computers, power supplies, tape drives, cameras, the table would quickly be covered with electronics, power cords, and zipper bags. The computers always came in pairs. There were two Northstar Z80 machines, then two Sol 8080 machines, then two Osborne CPM machines, two PC knockoffs, on and on. They came in pairs, and they were PC’s. Never MACs. In the mid 1970’s when he started his computer enthusiasm, computers needed a support group. He would commute to the computer clubs weekly with his computers, set up, copy disks, disks, and disks, and disks of programs. Very few of the copies worked, as the copies were poor, but he copied disks, and copied disks, and copied disks. When you needed a piece of software, he was guaranteed to know someone, who could provide a copy, that didn’t work. But you had a copy of it!

At one point the computer, camera, video tape, copying hobby got so serious that he bought an Airstream trailer to provide more space to store the collection. The Airstream was about 30 feet long and parked in our front yard. He filled it with boxes, and tapes, and computers. The concept was quite simple. The Oakland fire of 1989 that burned down 3,000 homes, scared him. He decided that he needed to be able to escape in the face of another fire. Alfia and I had video taped a friend’s wedding on the Saturday before the Oakland fire. We got up and were driving over to Orinda from San Francisco when we first saw the fire. The goal of our trip was to use my dad’s computerized video editing equipment to make a wedding video for a friend. My dad had the video editing equipment, and special effects boxes. So we drove over to Orinda. We could see the fire from San Francisco but weren’t quite sure where it was. We could see it as we crossed the Bay Bridge, but couldn’t quite tell where it was. We then drove up to the Caldecott Tunnel on the way to Orinda, and right into the fire. The sky was black with smoke except for the burning embers floating everywhere. Even the sun was blackened by the smoke. People were panicking as homes were consumed by the fire storm. We opened the sun roof on the General Motors station wagon and began filming the chaos. We drove up over the Berkeley hills through Tilden Park and then down Fish Ranch Road to highway 24 beyond the Tunnel, to get to Orinda to help him evacuate. The winds were fierce, from the west, and hot with burning embers, he thought he might have to escape. We loaded the cars with electronics, and disks, and tapes. The experience of a fire storm is life changing, and as my father watched the video tape we were editing, he decided he needed a plan. An Airstream trailer would allow him to take his video tapes, and computer disks, and computers, and electronics, and escape. So he bought and then loaded the Airstream. There is just one minor problem. When you are 70, 80, going on 90, a 30 foot long, Airstream trailer filled with file cabinets with video tapes and electronics, pulled by a 1966 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser, down a curvy, one lane, tree lined, mountain road, is not a fast escape. The Airstream was ultimately filled with stuff but never moved from its place in the front yard.

One of the goals of the computers, videos, cameras, and enthusiasm was to write. He wanted to write. The first approach was to build two computers, load them with memory. Why two? Well, what if one breaks? In the mid 1970’s a computer loaded with memory meant 12K, then 24K, but load them with memory. Then get a text editor, which at the time was electric pencil, then word star, then word perfect, then word. Then get a Sony tape recorder, first real to real, then cassette, then. Then get a foot switch to turn on and off the recorder. Then get a special desk to put the transcript to put the paper. At first he built a printer using his IBM Selectric. Electromagnets were installed that pulled on the typewriter mechanism to make it into a printer. Then it was Epson, dot matrix, then daisy wheel, then ink jet. All this effort was spent getting ready to write. He would get really, really, ready to write and then go to lunch. Then he would get really, really, ready to write, but it was then time for dinner, or a computer support group that was working on a new word processor that would take speech and put it to text, which would accelerate the writing. Needless to say, some things got written, but many of them were written by others on the wonderful systems he built.

There were many computer support groups over the years. They were not like AA, “I am Roger, and I am a computer enthusiast. It has been twelve milliseconds since I last used a computer.” “Hi Roger.” No these were computer support groups for people around the bay area that “shared’ software, advice, donuts, and discussions of computers. He was a member of the Forth Interest Group. Forth is a stack oriented computer language built on Reverse Polish Notation that is designed to develop software quickly. My dad was a fan of FORTH. “Forth is vastly superior to all other languages and allowed extremely rapid software development of computer programs that ran faster than machine code.” I must have heard that lecture a thousand times. No amount of argument was able to shake his faith that a computer language that ultimately produced machine code, could be faster than software written in machine code. But I digress. My dad was a FORTH enthusiast. He got ready to learn FORTH. He went to meetings to discuss FORTH. FORTH was going to be great. He was going to write great books using FORTH. Needless to say, while FORTH still exists, it did not enable my dad to produce the great literary works it so advertised.

So what can I say, he loved technology. He loved electronics, and cameras, and video, and computers, and stereos, and radios, and the little bags they all fit in, He was never an audiophile, or a videophile, he was a technophile, and a philistine, but that is another story. The one amazing thing about this electronics enthusiasm was that he never started a company to sell his knowledge. He soldered together four computers in the mid 1970’s. He discussed starting a company in the mid 1970’s to make phone scramblers with George Hect, a physicist and electrical engineer who developed electronic watches and the LCD monitor. He wrote lots of software to do studies but he never sold his knowledge, or marketed a product. He simply enjoyed technology.

I met Roger only two years ago. My wife and I were on a 34 day cruise around Australia and New Zealand, and I had forgotten to bring the battery charger for my Canon. So I was surreptitiously looking at cameras that other passengers had, hoping to spot one like mine. And that's how I met Roger, during a tour along Brisbane's main river.

Despite Roger being older than my father we hit it off rather quickly, as we both loved science. Every day, I would bring one of my two batteries down to his and Gretchen's stateroom; he would plop it into one of his two chargers, giving me my other one, fully recharged. We would chat, and as the cruise wore on we joined up for meals and social events aboard the ship. He always wore suspenders that looked like yardsticks.

We remained in touch by email, and he was always beseeching us to visit him in Malahat, including mailing us photos and descriptions of his beautiful home. We are sad that we never made it in time.

He was a remarkable man, always full of interesting facts and opinions. I'm very happy that he lived such a long and rewarding life, remaining bright and full of the joy of life to the end. His passing has deeply touched me.

White Wagon

White Wagon:

My dad, Roger Wallace, Ph.D., had a very weird relationship with physical stuff. Things had to come in pairs, or sets, and the more features the better. If you couldn’t get the version with the most features, and then get more than one, you didn’t bother at all. This strange condition manifest in many, many ways. One time I needed a watch and he decided he would get me one for my birthday. He asked me what type I wanted, and I was quite clear. I wanted a digital watch with numbers for the seconds. Well, I had been very clear, a watch showed up for my birthday. It was a mechanical watch, it had hands, and a second hand, but he had bought seven of them! He distributed them to my brother, sister, cousin, etc.

The physical possession weirdness manifest especially clearly when it came to cars. He got a new Chevy sedan in 1936 to drive to college. It cost $500 and had all the features, every, single one, an electric clock. Well it is a feature. As a kid we had terrible American cars that broke down repeatedly. In 1966 he bought two new cars, a very weird thing for him to do, a 1966 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser in “Sierra Mist” (light gold color) with all the features including air conditioning, which was new, seat belts, also new, and a flasher that you could put on when the car broke down, it was fantastic. He also bought a red MG four door sedan. Probably the only four door MG in the world, but we had one, and it had air conditioning! We then drove around the United States for six weeks visiting each and every tourist spot in the country. My mom decided it was not optimal to go, so my dad took three kids, for six weeks, in the summer, on a drive around the U.S. When we got to Las Vegas, he decided we didn’t quite have enough people in the car, so he called home, and invited my sister’s friend Galyn Johnson to come along. We stayed in hotels every night, ate in restaurants three meals a day. We got extremely good at ordering in restaurants in a very efficient manner. Everyone needed essentially the same thing, it ran like clock work. At the end of the day we would check out hotels. He would walk into the office to check on price, a kid was assigned to check the pool for temperature, a slide, a diving board, etc. The motels had a multi-parameter rating based on pool temperature, accoutrements, and hotel price. We twice stayed in a hotel in Las Vegas on the strip that had windows in the wall of the pool that allowed you to view the Las Vegas Strip! The night Galyn showed up we went to a Casino for dinner. My dad was giving a lecture on the problems with gambling. We were in a long line for the buffet next to a bunch of slot machines which were dinging, and dinging. I was six, my brother Doug 10, Betsy and Gaylyn 12. “You see, these people are not happy, they are just loosing their money.” Suddenly a woman won $50,000 from a slot about a foot from us. The machine did not have enough coins to pay off the JACKPOT! So a casino worker brought over a huge wheel barrow of coins to dump on the floor. My father’s response at this point in the lecture “Don’t mention this to your mother.”

We had a wonderful time on the trip. We skin dived in the Florida Keys. We went to Key West, we did Washington DC, we drove the long way across Texas in the middle of summer. We did the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Four Corners, Dinosaur Parks, we did each and every tourist spot in the continental United States in one summer, in one brand new American car. At one point one of us spilled lemonaide on a seat belt of this new American Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser. It stiffened the seat belt strap, remember this is 1966. That seat belt, was still stiff, and hard to adjust, when you put it on 450,000 miles later when I drove the car in 1996, as an attending anesthesiologists in San Francisco. My dad had begun his weird, American station wagon collection. The next vista cruiser was a baby blue 1967.

There were some minor changes but the car generosity started early. At one point he lent the 1967 Vista Cruiser to Art Rosenfeld, Ph.D. another physicist at Berkeley and now the California Energy Commissioner, in trade for an iridescent green Fiat Spider. It had a stick shift for us to learn how to drive a stick in the Berkeley hills. Art Rosenfeld needed a Vista Cruiser, so we just traded for a couple of years. We drove the Fiat for a couple of years, but the baby blue 1967 Vista Cruiser returned. It was joined by two 1969 vista cruisers that he bought used in 1977 when they hit $1000 a piece. So, we had a set of four.

In 1974, the Arab Oil Embargo hit. Waiting in line for gas for hours on your ration day was not so much fun. My dad purchased two 1974 Chevy Vega Station wagons. They got an amazing 20 miles to the gallon. You remember the model. They had automatically adjustable seat belts that constricted until you were cut in half. They wouldn’t start if the seat belt wasn’t buckled just like an amusement ride roller coaster. They had the sloped front grill to allow for the five mile an hour bumper. They had an aluminum engine block to reduce weight. They were a really cool idea. One in orange and one in yellow, they just weren’t very reliable. My brother took one, welded a 50 gallon steel gasoline tank together that was just the size of the roof rack, bolted it on the roof, plumbed it, and then drove off to college in San Diego. There is nothing like the safety of a Chevy Vega station wagon with a 50 gallon gasoline tank on the roof in the hands of a teenager. But Doug is an extremely responsible guy, and it did allow one to drive the 10 hours from Orinda to San Diego at 55 miles an hour without stopping for fuel or a toilet break.

So here we are in the mid 1970’s with six American station wagons. 1966, 1967, two 1969 Oldsmobile Vista Cruisers, and two Chevy Vega wagons. A terrible thing happened, according to my dad, they stopped making the Vista Cruiser. The windows in the roof reminiscent of the observation car in a railway train were gone. Cruising in the car with all the memories of train ride was no longer selling American station wagons. It was passing era. The sun roof came in and my dad started buying used white $1000 Buick wagons with a sun roof. They came in packs. When I lived in Baltimore, we had two, provided by my dad. They roamed the country getting 15 miles a gallon. He would lend one to my sister, then another, then another. At one point the 1966 Vista Cruiser, your mother’s car, as he would say, was lent to Betsy. Now this is a sacred vehicle. It had gone 450,000 miles. It was smooth, very smooth, except of course for the seat belt that was still stiff from the lemonade one of us spilled in 1966. Shifting the automatic transmission didn’t require even pulling the lever fore or aft, the stops were all worn down you could just change gears. He lent it to Betsy. Soon after a broken fuel line led to a fire and it was destroyed. How could this have happened? It was in “perfect” shape.

My dad then shifted into Chevy Suburbans. In 1977, when we bought the set of used $1000, 1969 Vista cruisers, he had looked at a used $4000 Chevy Suburban. We had always wanted the four wheel drive for the snow, but it was way, way too expensive. But in 1992 he bought a white, very used, Chevy Suburban named Moby Doc for me to use. It was great, except for a few “features”. I drove it around the block and you could turn the steering wheel 360 degrees without affecting the wheels in any way. “Oh, that is the four wheel drive.” He said.

“No, dad, I have driven cars before, when you turn the steering wheel, the front wheels are supposed to turn.” Well, it went off to Holland’s garage for a bit of maintenance, as many of the cars had before it, and was back. It was bouncy enough that I managed to herniate two disks in my neck commuting to work in San Francisco. But it was “safe” as my dad would say. To a particle physicist, mass is the only important feature of automobile safety. The more massive vehicle wins in the collision. This theory had been tested many times with the station wagons.

In the mid 1970’s at Donner Lake, a Ford Station wagon coming down the access road to the lake, in mid winter had crossed the center line, in the snow, and hit the left front corner of the 1966 Vista Cruiser. The steel at that point had aged a bit but it cut the Ford in two. The Ford went to the Reno junk yard, the Vista Cuiser had some new paint a couple of thousand miles later. In the late 1980’s, before the 1989 San Francisco Earthquake destroyed the freeway, my dad was exiting at Fell Street, and a pedestrian ran across in front of the 1966 Vista Cruiser. My dad with lightening fast reflexes of a 70 year old, hit the breaks, and the old girl rapidly decelerated, the way American cars with 450,000 miles on them do, she leaned forward on her suspension, lifted her back end, and stopped. A red Ferrari, with assumingly equal responses, slid right up under the back end of the Vista Cruiser in a most uncompromising, but in San Francisco acceptable, position. The tail hitch of the Vista Cruiser punctured the wind shield of the Ferrari. Well, the Ferrari was junk. There is nothing like an American station wagon sitting on your front hood to do that. The Vista Cruiser got a bit of red paint on one of the bolts on the trailer hitch. Mass beats technology in particle collisions.

The wagons kept coming. There was one always kept at Holland garage in Berkeley on Salono avenue. With the reliability of used, $1000, American automobiles you can save a lot of time by just leaving a car at the shop to trade off, ready when the next one breaks down. At one point, when I lived in Baltimore, I had the car break down three times in a row, on the way home from the repair shop. My dad, was spending $18,000 a year on car repair for seven American Station wagons. When asked about this “concept”, and the joys of this level of reliability, he would quote the mass argument. The concepts of how good the old steel was, how thick, but mostly, how important mass was. “Steel is cheap.” Yes, but steel that was reliable would be better. Alfia and I shared in the car pool. Each of use had a key case with seven sets of keys in a row. I would drive a car to work, park it in the lot. It might or might not be there at the end of the day. But there was always a white, American, General Motors, station wagon sitting in its place with my sun glasses and parking sticker. Now one must remember, I was an attending cardiac anesthesiologist with a wife, two kids, and a house in Marin county and I still didn’t own a car. When I went to buy my house, the mortgage broker was reviewing my debts and obligations. This was in the olden days when one put down 20% cash, got a 30-year fixed rate mortgage, and had to prove one had income, but I digress. “You don’t own a car?” “Nope, see I have one issued to me by my father. There are seven white station wagons in the car pool.” I say as I dangle the key case and the seven sets of keys in front of the broker. “Ah”.

Now I don’t want you to think that my father was a communist. Yes, he did live in the People’s Republic of Bezerkley for more than 60 years. Yes, he did have a communal car pool that he issued to you if you followed the family guidelines. But, while it may seem a bit “Communist”, it was. Well, just my father’s weirdness. To show you the all pervasive nature of parental teaching, in 2008, I went skiing with my brother Doug at Squaw Valley. For those who don’t know Tahoe ski resorts, Squaw Valley is the site of the 1960 winter Olympics. It has an enormous parking lot that holds, I don’t know, but at least 10,000 cars. I drove up to Tahoe in a white, Chevy Suburban, with my kids. We got ready to go skiing and then walked through the parking lot to the lift. I walked along and there was a white, four wheel drive, with every feature available, Toyota, my brother has always rebelled, with license plate Corazon. My father’s influences were so strong that I could pick out my brother’s new car, which I had never seen, out of 10,000 cars covered with ice and snow. When my brother purchased a car for his son on his graduation from the Naval Academy, it was a white station wagon. But I digress.

So, in the early 1990’s the white wagon commune was spreading. My dad was very worried that my brother didn’t have enough white wagons. He confiscated one we were driving and tried to give it to Doug. One must note, that at this point Doug was a cardiac surgeon, married to a neurointerventional radiologist, with two kids, living in Seattle; he still needed a white wagon, there was snow in Seattle. Doug bought his own. At one point I decided that I had to rebel. I really needed to do something to piss off my father. I decided that what would do it was to buy the most offensive car I could think of to an aging, particle physicist, who believed in mass when it came to collisions. I would buy a Miata! I thought about this plan. I called Doug to discuss my plan. Unfortunately, Doug had bought a Miata a week earlier for his wife Sharon. My plans were ruined. The only other car that would have been more offensive to my father’s sensibilities would have been some foreign sports car.

In the 1970’s there was a comic strip in California that my father loved called Gordo. It was about a Mexican Taxi Driver named Gordo. Ultimately Gordo did well enough that he purchased a maserati, which was notoriously unreliable and was always referred to in the strip as a miserari. My brother, the one who ruined my plans to rebel against the white wagon car pool, bought a maserati. Reliability of the car pool cars was always a problem. One night my dad in the mid 1990’s my dad was driving across San Francisco late at night and the car he was driving broke down. He pulled into a gas station to call AAA. Triple AAA had a special deal with my dad where he paid extra money and got a bulk discount on car towing. Well, while he was waiting once again to be towed, Willie Brown the mayor of San Francisco pulled into the gas station. They started talking and Willie said something to the effect of, you know for an old guy with a crummy car, you need a cell phone. That is at least the summary of the conversation my dad gave to his conversation with the famously dapper, former speaker of the California State Assembly and Mayor of San Francisco, that he should solve his car problems by getting a cell phone. He got one.

Well, something had to be done. The problem is simply that when one is issued a free car, no matter how bad it is, it is free. And free, well, free is really… free. Everything is more expensive than free. In the mid 1990’s, Alfia’s dad Alfred came to live with us after his stroke. We had two kids at this point and a house in Marin County. I was a cardiac anesthesiologist but didn’t own a car. The car I was driving, a free, white Buick station wagon with a sun roof, was really special. It had some features that other cars don’t have. Two of the brakes didn’t work. One could change lanes on the freeway simply by applying the brakes. You could only change lanes to the left, but it was still a feature. I asked my dad about this. “Oh, well, every time I take a car into Holland’s they do a complete check, and they check the brakes. It is fine.” Alfia was driving one from the car pool as well. She had it break down on the freeway in San Rafael with two kids in car seats. It was a special moment for a woman who learned to drive at 26, under the tutelage of her boy friend, and soon to be husband. Something had to be done. The problem was simple. The only acceptable car to Roger Wayne Wallace was a white Chevy Suburban with all the features. Art went to the dealer and the 1996 versions only had a driver’s side air bag. I offered to buy one, but there is something about a wife saying. “Don’t you love me enough to get a car with an airbag on my side as well?” That makes a husband wait. So, 1997 model cars came around. They had two airbags, they had white, Chevy suburbans, with every feature. We bought one and brought it home. My dad came over regularly to visit, baby sit the kids, but mostly go out to dinner to talk, and drink iced tea with too much lemon. The white suburban was sitting in front of the house. “Oh, whose is that?” “Ours” “Why did you get that?” I was 37 years old and owned my first car! My dad thought it absurd.

He loved the car though. He drove it around. It was so unique actually having brakes that worked, that he rode them so much he lit them on fire the first time he drove it. He decided it had to be kept in the garage. The problem was it was so large it didn’t fit. We spent a day moving the shelves in the garage so the Surburban had 1 inch clearance all around in the garage. Nothing else fit in it including having to open the garage door to get to the washing machine so it was only in the garage one time for one day but it is a beautiful car. Alfia drove the burban and I kept driving white communal General Motors cars. A year later, I was going on a business trip to Los Angeles. I was on my way to the airport when I stopped at the VA to pick up some electronics we were building. I opened the car door to put in the electronics and the window fell out in my hands. Well, no problem, I’ve got duct tape, I can fix that. A month or so later I was driving home from the hospital passing through San Rafael and the brakes just wouldn’t slow the car down. I pulled off at a gas station near our house to get some non Holland’s service. The oil light would come on every time I slowed to stop. There were a number of issues. I had asked my dad to have Holland’s look at the oil light issue many times. It was quite reliable indicator. Every time the RPM went below 1000, the oil light came on. I was a cardiac anesthesiologist, I know how to read an alarm. I know what alarms are for. When I spoke to the mechanic he said. “Your engine is shot. Your rings are shot. You need a new engine.” “Could I just get thicker oil?” “Nope.” “How about a bigger oil pump?” “Nope.” “Dr Wallace, you need a new car.”

I drove home slightly dejected but Alfia was quite clear. You are going to buy a new car. Well, what would be acceptable to Roger Wallace? Oh, the only car would be a white Chevy suburban. The problem is I commute to San Francisco every day. I drove up to the Chevy dealer with very clear instructions, buy a car. I purchased a beautiful, white, 1997 Chevy Tahoe with every feature. My father was going to be so proud. It was identical to the 1997 white Chevy Surburban with two air bags, and every single feature just 20 inches shorter to allow one to park in San Francisco. It would be a new member of the white wagon commune. Parking huge cars in small spaces, in the Wallace family, is a sign of man hood. The ability to back a trailer up is a sign that one is a man. My brother Doug many times drove to family functions in large farm vehicles or trucks. One time he parked a semi near our house on the one Ferrari width wide streets, just because. He parked a dump truck on Belvedere island when he came to visit my Aunt Sandy at Christmas. For those of you who don’t know, Belvedere island in San Francisco bay has roads narrow and curvy enough that Ferrari’s barely fit, dump trucks are hard to park. So the argument that a Wallace needs a car that is twenty inches shorter to park in San Francisco during a daily commute, doesn’t hold much water with Wallace clan, but I was a wuss.

My dad came over that night. The brand new, white, Chevy Tahoe, with every feature was sitting in the drive way. “What’s that?” “That’s my new car.” “Why did you get the small one.” After much hand wringing my dad came to me very, very concerned. He had decided that because this car was so light, and dangerous, that he would buy me a RooBar to fit to the front of it. Roobars are the steel gratings the Australians bolt on the front of cars like a cow catcher to deflect wayward kangaroos. It took months to convince my father that there were very few kangaroos that I could hit with my Chevy Tahoe on the commute to San Francisco. In 2007, after 160,000 miles the 1997 Chevy Tahoe, which is a wonderful car, started having a few issues. It was joined by a 2007, white Chevy Tahoe, with all the features. A day after purchase we drove the 2007 Tahoe to Canada to visit my dad in Victoria. 2000 miles of driving in a week with four people, it was fantastically comfortable, he was right. In the summer of 2010, my dad was driving up from San Diego to Victoria passing through San Rafael. We lent him the 1997 white Chevy Suburban to drive to Victoria, it broke down an hour into the trip, but despite that issue, he had a wonderful trip, it was a “great” car, and the white wagon commune continued.