John Niederhauser: Recollections of a Life in Science and Agriculture

Chapter 1

Family and Early Life I was born on September 27, 1916 in Seattle, Washington. My parents were Charles and Ruth Niederhauser. When I was three years old, my family left rainy Seattle and moved inland to a community between Wenatchee and Cashmere where we raised apples on a small family farm. This was my first connection to agriculture. Some of my earliest memories are collecting ripe apples off the ground in autumn—and I even raised a few vegetables in a garden.

I had a sister, Ruth Louise, who was three years older and a brother, Sydney, three years younger. Ruth Louise attended Stanford for two years, but did not graduate. She became a school teacher and later, when her career began to stall due to the lack of formal education, she completed her degree at San Francisco State Teachers College. On the other hand, Sydney was born with cerebral palsy and lived as normal a life as possible given his physical limits and the limits of the times. He graduated high school and attended a junior college for several years. Sydney worked various jobs, including one at the Palo Alto-Stanford Medical Center and at Goodwill Industries in Santa Cruz, where he would receive the Goodwill Worker-of-the-Year award from then governor of California Ronald Reagan.

My life was deeply affected by various members of my family, including my most flamboyant relative, my mother’s sister, Anna Louise Strong. She was a Quaker who became fascinated by the promises of socialism. She traveled to the Soviet Union as part of the Hoover Famine Committee in 1921. The years

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2 Chapter 1 after World War I were difficult ones in the Soviet Union and she was deeply moved by the people’s struggle to survive and improve their nation. Aunt Anna stayed on for years, becoming a tireless advocate for closer relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. She was a favorite of leftwing organizations, particularly in America, and lectured frequently on issues of communist government and society. After World War II, Anna Strong began an equally forceful advocacy on behalf of the People’s Republic of China and their peasant-based version of the socialist dream, and became a good friend to both Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai.1 I never shared my aunt’s leftwing politics, although, like her, I traveled and worked in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and even during the Cold War, when few Americans could maintain contacts with Soviets without attracting attention and suspicion as a “fellow traveler.” I was, however, never swept up into the leftist and socialist circles frequented by my aunt, although those groups expressed an interest in cultivating me. My connections to the Soviet Union remained personal and professional, never political.2 Closer to home, my mother, Ruth, was a quiet and caring person who taught by example. She strove to be fair and settle disputes equitably with a calm decisiveness that might not have pleased all participants completely, but her opinion was always viewed as a reasonable and acceptable conclusion.

Throughout my life, whenever I had to make a tough decision involving others, I would inevitably ask myself, “What would my mother do here?”3 However, the family member most significant to my development was my father, Charles. He was a chemistry teacher and taught at every level from elementary school to university. He was born in Ohio and attended Oberlin College, where he had met his future wife, Ruth Strong; she graduated in the same class. The exposure to the sciences created by my father left an impression on me and likely predisposed me to a career in science. But it was my father’s dedication as a teacher that affected me most. He was a skilled teacher and tireless worker. In addition, he was a man of great intellectual honesty. It was not enough for him to simply teach and churn out students. He wanted to understand the nature of teaching, improve it, and thereby turn out better students.

My father taught high school chemistry in Washington and California. In 1919, he was fired from a high school teaching job in Seattle, possibly due to his German heritage and his wife’s radical sister, Anna Louise Strong. He taught high school in Wenatchee until 1924 when we moved to the Bay Area in California. In 1928, he left high school teaching and became a dean of a junior college at Atascadero, California and within a year he joined the faculty of the Department of Education at Stanford University.4 Over the course of several years at Stanford, my father noticed a lack of dedication and interest in

John S. Niederhauser: Recollections of a Life in Science and Agriculture 3 many of his students, a feeling shared by other members of the faculty. He began to formulate ideas about education that challenged the status quo, and he became the leader of a small group of faculty in the Education Department who found fault with a primary education system that graduated students without proper preparation. My father felt so strongly about his ideas that he left a stable career at prestigious Stanford to become a superintendent and teacher of seventh and eighth grades at a small school in rural Las Lomitas, California, where he could practice his educational ideas on the ground level.5 The basic concept that my father wanted instilled in educators was a dedication to excellence and, to achieve it, a decrease in the attention to grading linked to time. What might take one person fifteen minutes to grasp and master might take another fifteen hours. He felt that the point of education was that they master the information completely, not just show what amount of the information they could master in the time allowed for a class or a test. I later characterized my father’s theory as, “You don’t want a doctor who does ‘C’ work. You don’t care if he takes a little longer with the operation, but you want him to do it right.”

His concepts garnered attention for little Las Lomitas school, and teachers from local colleges would often come there to do their student teaching, but still the movement gained little regional or national momentum.

Although my father had an engaging personality and great skill as a teacher, he loathed writing anything down. He felt that committing his ideas to paper would lead those who came after to follow slavishly the written doctrine and stifle their own creativity, which is what had gotten education into trouble in the first place. Even so, this lack of formalization caused his ideas to prosper and ultimately fade along with the personalities involved, my father and a few colleagues, rather than giving them a self-perpetuating existence. The lesson of my father’s inability to effectively organize the survival of his ideas would always have an enormous impact on me. Failure to promote an important new strategy could lead to its failure to be widely adopted and utilized, no matter how effective it might be. I took this lesson to heart in my own work as I later helped establish programs in research and development.

I loved school and excelled as a student. I finished top of my class at Palo Alto High School in 1933. It was considered a foregone conclusion that I would attend college, but we did not know how to pay for it. This was the midst of the Depression and money was in short supply everywhere, including the Niederhauser home. An elementary school principal did not make the same salary as a university professor.

The bleak prospects for a college education became brighter when I received a letter from Deep Springs College in the last month of high school.

Deep Springs offered me a scholarship including room, board, and tuition for

4 Chapter 1 three years. Although neither I nor anyone in my family had ever heard of Deep Springs, my mother and I took a ride to the isolated Deep Springs Valley to look the place over.

Deep Springs promised to be a very unusual and very bucolic college experience and not necessarily one that would normally have been attractive to me. I had not shown any great interest in agricultural activity despite exhibiting a penchant for the study of nature. In junior high school, under the influence of my first memorable science teacher, Robert Rhodes, I assembled extensive collections of wildflowers and butterflies. I continued this passion throughout my life. But this was more of a boyish interest in collecting wild things rather than a significant desire to study natural or agricultural science.

Deep Springs College is located on the edge of the desert near the California-Nevada border. It dominated the semi-arid countryside of the surrounding valley; in fact, the ranch buildings were the only structures for miles around. The student body then consisted of approximately twenty-five young men, with eight or nine members in each three-year class. Deep Springs was a working ranch and an intentional community dedicated to the principles of its founder, Lucien Lucius Nunn.6 L. L. Nunn was in many ways a typical figure of the so-called Progressive Era in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He saw that the advance of technology and the education required to use it were the chief tools to improve civilization. Nunn was an engineer, most famously associated with the Ontario power plant at Niagara Falls, so he formed a training program for young men to create a highly skilled cadre of electrical engineering and management professionals. In 1905, this program was named the Telluride Institute and was centered at a large power plant in Utah. He then made a number of agreements with colleges and universities around the country to take his students, including founding Telluride House at Cornell University.

In 1917, he moved his base of operations to the isolated Swinging T Ranch in the Deep Springs Valley of California and created Deep Springs College.7 Deep Springs College was founded on Nunn’s “Principle of Three Pillars”: academics, labor, and self-governance. Academics were no longer connected to specific job training such as engineering. Labor had always been an integral part of Nunn’s training regimen because he was developing men to run electrical systems at western mines, but at Deep Springs labor was required to maintain the ranch. The College was also self-governing, managed by the small student body itself, in order to teach the students the value of personal interaction and the necessities of preparation and compromise in running an institution. All of this was part of Nunn’s belief that the best way to prepare a young man for a life of service was by the combination of a little hard work, a little hard study, and the hard knocks of running an operation.

John S. Niederhauser: Recollections of a Life in Science and Agriculture 5 I came to Deep Springs College in 1933 not out of any great desire to prepare for a life of service or out of dedication to the school’s philosophy, but simply because it was my best way to get a college degree for free. In addition, I found the self-sufficient community aspect of the College quite congenial and fit in well. Here, I received my first real experience working in agriculture. I milked cows, cultivated crops, drove a tractor, and worked as a mechanic in the garage.

A day at Deep Springs started with farm work from 7 a.m. until noon, followed by classes in the afternoon. The courses were often quite informal.

Teachers came to Deep Springs from Cornell or California universities, some for as little as three months, but others for as much as a year. With the small class sizes, students felt a close bond with their professors. And despite the relatively relaxed structure of classes, the nature of the school encouraged individual study. I read more voluminously during this time than any other in my life. I also acquired a newfound interest in subjects such as geology and desert biology.

By the end of my second year at Deep Springs, I knew I would be attending Cornell University after my third year at the ranch. It was generally assumed that students at Deep Springs would move on to Cornell. There was very little screening of the Tellurides by Cornell Admissions, and little need to, as they tended to score higher as a body than the Cornell average. I was accepted for membership in the Telluride Association, which assured a spot to live at Telluride House on the Cornell campus at Ithaca, New York.

Therefore, I was looking at three years of free room, board, and tuition. This was an extraordinarily fortunate turn of events for a young man who had been facing an uncertain future of no college education only two years earlier.8 With the excitement of college on the East Coast ahead of me, like many students on summer vacation, I was itching to travel. I had a life savings of $270 from working summers for many years. At the time, in the depths of the Depression, the Cunard White Star steamship line tried to drum up business by offering passage from New York to any European port for only $99. This also included round trip bus fare from anyplace in the United States to New York City, Cunard’s port of embarkation. This meant a bus ride across America, a roundtrip cruise from New York to Europe, a bus trip to Ithaca and then the return trip by bus home for Christmas…all for $99! Given a choice of four ports—Southampton, Rotterdam, Helsinki, or Leningrad—I looked at a map and saw the farthest port of call was Leningrad.

When I was informed that I needed a visa to go to Leningrad, I headed for the Soviet consulate in San Francisco. I was offered an Intourist visa for $12 a day, which included expenses for hotel, meals, and train travel while in the Soviet Union. I inquired about the possibility of a cheaper visa and was

6 Chapter 1 offered the option of a “worker’s” visa, which was free. I took it. What I did not know was that worker’s visas were only for professionals who were visiting the U.S.S.R. on official business and who were to be met and escorted, not for young men with no plans beyond finding their next meal. The consular official apparently did not know the rules either.9 In June, I took passage in New York and arrived in the Soviet Union on a long summer evening in early July. I had money in my pocket, but no firsthand knowledge of the U.S.S.R. or any ability to speak Russian. When I walked off the boat onto the streets of Leningrad with the wrong visa stamped on my passport, little did I realize that my life was about to find direction.