December 1981

SPAN 2

Economic Development for the Common Good

by President Ronald Reagan

4

A New Spirit at Cancun

by President Jose Lopez Portillo and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau

5 Architecture in Today's Churches

8

The Modern Spirit

by Stanley Abercrombie

10 In Search of the Miraculous

by Theodore Roszak

16 The Challenge of a Second Career .

19

Old Assumptions, New Realities

by Haig Babian

21

The Frontier Spirit

by Wallace Stegner

24

Walt Disney A Reconsideratio,! by Jacquelin Singh

30

A .Silver Dish A short story by Saul Bellow

40 Freedom From Welfare Bill Monroe interviews Thomas Sowell

43 On the Lighter Side

44

Farming for the Future

by Sandy Greenberg

49 FilmIndia: Historical Retrospective

by B.K. Karanjia

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Photographs: Front cover-Sisse Brimberg, Š National Geographic Society. Inside front cover-Joseph P. Messana, 4 left-courtesy Mexican Embassy; right-Karsh, courtesy Canadian High Commission. 5-7Sisse Brimberg, Š National Geographic Society. 8-Joseph P, Messana. l6-courtesy Ebony.

17-Robert Houser; Gordon Baer; Anestis Diakopoulos, 18-Henry Grossman; courtesy Ebony. 24-29-courtesy Walt Disney Productions except 27 bottom courtesy U.S. Travel Service.

30-Phillip Galgiani, courtesy San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. California. 40-courtesy Hoover Institution. 45-Merle Jensen. 46-48Terence Moore except 47 bottom right and 48 center by Merle Jensen.

49-5I-courtesy B.K. Karanjia. Inside back cover-Tomas Sennett except bottom and bottom right by Christopher Springmann. Back coverChristopher Springmann.

Published by the International Communication Agency, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 11000I, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. The opinions exptessed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the United States Government.

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Front cover: This interior view of the Washington Cathedral, a majestic example of church architecture in the United States, highlights the fluted stone columns that form the ceiling of the nave. See also pages 5-9.

Back cover: An elderly resident of Chinatown, San Francisco, walks along the main street. See also page 53.

The recent meeting held in Cancun, Mexico, was a true international summit; many of the 22 nations were represented by their hea,ds of government, including President Ronald Reagan of the United States and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India. The private meeting of these representatives of the world s two foremost democracies was described by both parties as a warm and friendly one. There had been fears in advance that Cancun would be another of those confrontational slugfests that have exacerbated differences between developed and developing nations in recent years-producing much heat but little light. Happily, as cochairmen President Jose Lopez Portillo of Mexico and Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau noted in their summary document (p. 4), throughout the meeting the discussion was pragmatic and direct. The sessions were characterized by an extremely constructive and positive spirit. The task, all participants agreed, was to build on this spirit of trust and understanding. Two complementary tasks are to be accomplished: the world economy has to be revitalized; and the development of developing countries to be accelerated. President Reagan, in a speech before the plenary session (p. 2), emphasized the need for joint action by all nations to seek solutions to common problems. Incidentally, the Soviet Union was conspicuous by its absence. As President Reagan had remarked earlier: "They simply wash their hands of all responsibility, insisting that all the economic problems of the world result from capitalism ahd all the solutions lie with socialism. The real reason they're not coming is they have nothing to offer. " Mrs. Gandhi reportedly told newsmen in New Delhi on her return from Cancun that the summit was a step forward. All parties agreed that followup meetings and actions are necessary to deal with a wide spectrum of problem areas: food security and agricultural development; commodities, trade and industrialization; energy; and mone~ary and financial issues. This is a large agenda indeed. But with international technical and financial support for developing nations, in coordination with their modification of their ,internal policies and structures, much progress can be made. ; A decade ago, Theodore Roszak wrote a widely noted book, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition. The book described the opposition of many young Americans in the 1960s and 1970s to scie'nce, technology and rationality in general--which they viewed as tools for the manipulation of human beings, with disastrous long-term consequences. These young people turned, instead, to a belief in the intuitive, mystical powers latent in each individual.

Now, in an article called "In Search of the Miraculous" (p.lO), Professor Roszak surVeys the unhappy consequences of the rejection of rationality in the West in certain circles: the growing pursuit of strange visionary adventures (UFO cults and ESP, spiritualism and faith cures, various esoteric forms of Oriental meditation). He laments the vulgarization and commercialization of a movement that began as a genuine search for moral values in an uncertain world.

Professor Roszak ends by calling on intellectuals in the West to leave off their privatistic efforts at purely personal salvation through exotic techniques. He urges them to return to the tradition of the Greek philosopher Socrates, who taught in the streets of Athens that private and public virtue coincide. This is a ringing call for social commitment as a guide to the spiritually perplexed of our age.

--M. P. I

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT FOR THE COMMON GOOD Recently, 22 heads of state and government from some of the world's most important developing and developed countries, including Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and President Ronald Reagan, met in Cancun, Mexico, to address the problems of global economic growth and development, especially of the Third World. In his speech at the conference, reprinted below, President Reagan allayed the delegates' fears that the United States might ignore the developing world, assuring them that "the contribution America has made to development-and will continue to make-is enormous."

In many ways, this summit is not ours alone. It belongs to the millions who look to us for help and for hope. If they could speak to us today, I believe they might tell us that words are cheap, that cooperative action is needed-and needed now.

In their name, let us join together and move forward. Let us meet the challenge of charting a strategic course for global economic growth and development for all nations.

Each of us comes to Cancun from a different domestic setting where our major responsibilities are found. My own government has devoted much of this past year to developing a plan of action to strengthen our economy. For years our government has overspent, overtaxed and overregulated, causing¡ our growth rates to decline and our inflation and interest rates to rise.

We have taken bold measures to correct these problems and we are confident they will succeed-not tomorrow, nor next week, but over the months and years ahead.

We believe restoring sound economic policies at home represents one of the most important contributions the United States can make to greater growth and development abroad. The actions we are taking will renew confidence in the dollar, strengthen our demand for imports, hold down inflation, reduce interest rates and the cost of borro~ing, and increase resources fQr foreign investment.

2

SPAN DECEMBER

1981

I have also had a chance to study and discuss with various leaders the domestic problems you face. I know how diverse and serious they are. For the poorest countries, more food and energy are urgently needed, while raising productivity through education, better health and nutrition, and the acquisition of basic facilities such as roads and ports represent longer-term goals.

Middle-income countries need foreign capital, technical assistance and the development of basic skills to improve their economic climate and credit-worthiness in international capital markets. The more advanced developing nations, which already benefit from the international economy, need increasing access to markets to sustain their development.

And across the income spectrum, many among you who are oil importers face acute financial difficulties from the large debt burdens resulting from the oil price shocks of the 1970s. High interest rates are exacerbating these problems, such that debt servicing and energy costs are making excessive claims on your foreign exchange earnings.

We recognize that each nation's approach to development should reflect its own cultural, political and economic

heritage. That is the way it should be.

The great thing about our international system i!i that it respects diversity and promotes creativity.

Certain economic factors, of course, apply across cultural and political lines.

We are mutually interdependent, but, above all, we are individually responsible.

We must respect both diversity and economic realities when discussing grand ideas. As I said recently in Philadelphia, we do not seek an ideological debate; we seek to build,upon what we already know will work.

History demonstrates that time and again,' in place after place, economic growth and human progress make their greatest strides in countries that encourage economic freedom.

Government has an important role in helping develop a country's economic foundation. But the critical test is whether government is genuinely working to liberate individuals by creating incentives to work, save, invest and succeed.

Individual farmers, laborers, owners, traders and managers-they are the heart and soul of development. Trust them. Because whenever they are

allowed to create and build, wherever they are given a personal stake in deciding economic policies and benefiting from their success, then societies become more dynamic, prosperous, progressive and free.

With sound understanding of our domestic freedom and responsibilities, we can construct effective international cooperation. Without it, no amount of international good will and action can produce prosperity.

In examining our collective experience with development, let us remember that international economic institutions have also done much to improve the world economy. Under their auspices, the benefits of international commerce have flowed increasingly to all countries.

From 1950 to 1980, GNP [gross national product] per capita in 60 middle-income countries increased twice as fast as in the industrial countries when real purchasing power is taken into account.

Despite the mid-1970s recession, we were able to liberalize the international trading system under the leadership of the GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade]. This created new trading opportunities for a number of developed and developing countries.

The IMF [International Monetary Fund] remains the centerpiece of the international financial system. It has adjusted its programs and increased its resources to deal with the major pressures and problems of our era. The World Bank and other multilateral development banks have dramatically increased their resources and their overall support for development.

Much remains to be done to help low-income countries develop domestic markets and strengthen their exports. We recognize that: But we are just as convinced that the way to do this is not to' weaken the very system that has served us so well, but to continue working together to make it better.

I am puzzled by· suspicions that the United States might ignore the developing world. The contribution America has made to development-and will continue to make-is enormous.

We have provided $57,000 million to the developing countries in the last decade-$43,000 million in development assistance and $14,000 million in contributions to the multilateral development banks. Each year, the United States provides more food assistance to developing nations than all other nations combined. Last year we extended almost twice as much official development assistance as any other nation. . .

Even more significant is the U.S.

contribution in trade. Far too little world attention has been given to the importance of trade as a key to development.

The United States absorbs about ohehalf of all manufactured goods that nonOPEC [Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries] developing countries export to the industrialized world, even though our market is only one-third of the total industrialized world market.

Last year alone, we imported $60,000 million worth of goods from non-OPEC developing countries. That is more thaQ twice the official development assistance from all OECD [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development] countries. Our trade and capital markets are among the most open in the world.

The range and breadth of America's commitment extends far beyond concessional assistance. We believe in promoting development by maximizing every asset we have.

As the world's largest single market, we can be a powerful conductor for economic progress and well-being. We come to Cancun offering our hand in friendship as your partner in prosperity.

Together, we can identify the roadblocks to development, and decide the best ways to stimulate greater growth everywhere we can. We have yet to unleash the full potential for growth in a world of open markets ..

The United States is here to listen and learn. And when we leave Cancun, our search for progress will continue. The dialogue will go on. The bonds of our common resolve will not disappear with our jet trails.

We are prepared to carry out the commitment in the Ottawa summit declaration to conduct a more formal dialogue-bilaterally, with regional groups, in the United Nations and in specialized international agencies. We take seriously the commitment at Ottawa "to participate in preparations for a mutually acceptable process of global negotiations in circumstances offering the prospect of meaningful progress." .

It is our view that "circumstances offering the prospect of meaningful progress" are future talks based upon four essential understandings among the participants: • The talks should have a practical orientation toward identifying, on a caseby-case basis, specific potential for or obstacles to development which cooperative efforts may'enhance or remove. We will suggest an agenda composed of trade liberalization, energy and food resource development, and improvement in the investment climate.

• The talks should respect the com-

petence, functions and powers of the specialized international agencies upon which we all depend, with the understanding that the decisions reached by these agencies within respective areas of competence are final. We should not seek to create new institutions.

• The general orientation of the talks must be toward sustaining or achieving greater levels of mutually beneficial international growth and development, taking into account domestic economic policies, and • The talks should take place in an atmosphere of cooperative spirit similar to that which has brought us together in Cancun-rather than one in which views become polarized and chances for agreement iue needlessly sacrificed.

If these understandings are accepte.d, then the United States would be willing to engage in a new preparatory process to see what may be achieved. .

But our main purpose in coming to Cancun is to focus on specific questions of substance, not procedural matters. In this spirit, we bring a positive program of action for development concentrated around these principles: • Stimulating international trade by opening up markets, both within individual countries and among countries.

• Tailoring particular development strategies to the specific needs and potential of individual countries and regions. . • Guiding our assistance toward the development of self-sustaining productive activities, particularly in food and energy.

• Improving the climate for private capital flows, particularly private investment.

• And creating a political atmosphere in which practical solutions can move forward, rather than founder on a reef of misguided policies that restrain and interfere with the international marketplace or foster inflation.

In our conversations, we will be elaborating on the specifics of this program.

The program deals not in flashy new gimmicks, but in substantive fundamentals with a track record of success.

It rests on a coherent view of what's essential to development-namely political freedom and economic opportunity.

Yes, we believe in freedom. We know it works. It's just as exciting, successful and revolutionary today as it was 200 years ago.

Let us join together and proceed together. Economic development is an exercise in mutual cooperation for the common good. We can and must grasp this opportunity for our people and together to take a step for mankind. 0

~_I

_

A NEW SPIRIT AT CANCUN

BY PRESIDENT JOSE LOPEZ PORTILLO AND PRIME MINISTER PIERRE TRUDEAU

of conditions for growth and stability in other nations.

There was a strongly shared view that in the global community the problems of economic disparities among nations needed to be seen as the responsibility of all and therefore required concerted action. The view was expressed that, in an increasingly integrated world economy, no country or group of countries can evade their responsibilities. In this respect, regret was voiced about the absence of the Soviet Union from the meeting.

At the same time the importance of strengthening and We had the great honor to preside over a meeting of heads increasing the effectiveness of cooperation among developing countries was seen as an element of growing significance in of state and government designed to focus on relationships between North and South, particularly the serious economic international relations. Many participants regretted the amount of resources devoted to armaments which could be better problems confronting the international community.

We strongly believe that the very fact that 22 leaders from employed for developmental purposes.

It was recognized that many of the problems were deep and some of the world's most influential yet diverse countries were prepared to come to Cancun and discuss these issues clearly complex and not subject to quick or sil11Plisticsolutions. With a demonstrated the importance and gravity that they attached to long and difficult period "ahead, leaders committed themselves them. The North-South relationship was seen as one of the most to working together to try to build an international economic serious challenges to be faced in the coming decade, ranking order in which all states would be able to realize their potential with and linked to the maintenance of world peace as a priority with equal opportunities, and the developing countries in .particular would be able to grow and develop according to their for the attention of all governments.

The spirit which prevailed among us as we addressed these own values. The heads of state and government confirmed the fundamental issues was extremely constructive and positive. It desirability of supporting at the United Nations, with a sense of was clear from the outset that we were not here-indeed we urgency, a consensus to launch global negotiations on a basis to could not be here-to take decisions on behalf of the rest of the be mutually agreed and in circumstances offering the prospect world. Our task was rather to bring our voices to bear at the of meaningful progress. Some countries insisted that the competence of the specialized agencies should not be affected. highest level on the fundamental issues, to identify the major With respect to substance we focused on what we viewed as problems and to tryJo evaluate and promote possible solutions. the major issues and the challenges facing the world economy.

With this end in mind we spoke openly and frankly to one another and did not try to evade the hard issues. Nor did we Food Security and Agricultural Development mdulge in recrimination or casting of blame on others. We were Discussions on this topic indicated several general areas of not bound by traditional bureaucratic entanglements nor did we understanding and shared viewpoints regarding the following allow ourselves to be shackled by posturing or rhetoric. The atmosphere throughout was receptive to new ideas and principal questions: " ._ Persistent and widespread manifestations of hunger are approaches and a willingness to listen and understand. We believe that together we succeeded in creating a spirit of entirely incompatible with the level of development attained by the world economy and, in particular, with existing food genuine confidence and trust amongst ourselves. production capacity. Within as brief a period as possible, Our task now will be to ensure that we build upon this trust and understanding, carry this momentum forward into the hunger must be eradicated. This objective is clearly an future and translate thought into action and progress with the obligation of the international community and constitutes a first aim of revitalizing the world economy and accelerating the priority both at the national level and in the field of international cooperation. development. of developing countries. • Sustained and long-term internal effort on the part of the Obviously there were differences of views expressed. developing countries to attain increasing self-sufficiency in food Among 22 very diverse nations it could not be expected that production is the basic element to the problem of hunger. interests would be identical or approaches necessarily the same. • Fir~t, developing countries should define and put into But what struck us most forcefully were the many areas of operation, with the aid of ample and effective international shared priorities and the common ground.

All participants recognized the importance of interdepensupport, national food strategies covering the entire cycle of food production, productivity; distribution and consumption, dence in terms of the functioning of their economies, reflected in the fact that the economic prosperity of any country or that include effective action for rural development, by means of (Text continued on page 52) group of countries increasingly depends on the existence At the conclusion of the Cancun summit, the two cochairmen, Mexican President Portillo (right) and Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau (far right), issued a joint statement (excerpted below). Praising the extremely constructive and positive spirit that prevailed at the conference, the statement noted: "Our task now will be to ensure that we build upon this trust and understanding ... translate thouJ?ht into action and progress with the aim of revitalizing the world economy and accelerating the development of developing countries."

I

On the highest point of land in Washington, D.C., a 14th-century-style Gothic cathedral rises into the city's skyline (above). The Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul-better known as the Washington Cathedral-has been in the making for many years and is the final fulfillment of a previous century's proposal for a national religious monument for all faiths. In 1893 some members of the U.S. Protestant Episcopal Church established a foundation to raise money for the project. The first unit was opened to the public in 1912. Financed entirely by private donations, construction of the massive, limestone structure has, over the years, been stopped and restarted several times, depending on the flow of funds. Henry Yates Satterlee, the first Episcopal Bishop of Washington, was the one who insisted on the cathedral being built in the Gothic style, which he considered most "conducive to the thought of prayer." The second largest cathedral in the United States and the

Cathedral lor a Nation

sixth largest in the world, it is certainly one of the finest examples of Gothic architecture in the United States. Among its striking features are the more than 300 windows which illuminate the cathedral with the rich colors of handcrafted stained glass (left). The detail above is from the clay model of a stone sculpture-Ex Nihilo--that adorns the cathedral's west facade and depicts humankind emerging from the void during the creation of the world. The sculptor is Fredrick Hart Stone.

Although the church is the seat of the Episcopal Bishop of Washington (seen greeting worshippers at far left), it has opened its doors to people of all faiths and has been the site for several memorial and prayer services. The pulpit has been opened to non-Christian as well as Christian ministers and laymen.

Many people consider it a typical American anomaly that a cathedral operated by a minority church sect...:-among Protestants, the Episcopal Church has by far the smallest membership; 3.1 million compared to over 16 million B,aptists and 13 million Methodists-should become a national monument.

The Modern Spirit It wasn't really that long ago that Technology: It is a rectangular brick box architecture's big news was the birth of with a steel-framed roof. It holds a single the modern movement. Yet the battle to main space, interrupted only by low establish modernism was hardly won . partitions shielding the choir room and before modernism began battling for its sacristy and by a ceiling-high curtain of life. The end of modern architecture is natural shantung. Before this curtain is much discussed in the United States these the simplest possible cross of stainless days. The basis for these premature steel and, for an altar, a solid block of burial services for modern architecture is travertine. In its uncompromising severmodernism's own fault; early modern ity and plainness, this is a building close architecture, however diverse it may to the epitome of the doctrinaire modernactually have been, perceived and adver- ism so strongly rejected today. Yet van tised itself as being pure, strict, practical, der Rohe has imposed here-with his and universal. It saw itself as a no- basic strength, his considered dimennonsense style in clear contrast to the sions, his fine materials, and his precise eclecticism that preceded it. Quirkiness, detail-a sense of perfect stillness that ornamentation, romance, poetry-these is convincingly religious.

One of the most striking examples were not for the moderns. Yet this self-advertisement was never the whole of modernism and spirituality is Saint truth; modernism was not generally as Francis de Sales in Muskegon, Michigan, severe as it pretended, nor so unpoetic, designed by Marcel Breuer and Herbert and one of the proofs of this is the fact Beckhard, one of Breuer's partners. Lecthat it was able to produce such a number turing in Zurich in 1934, Breuer spoke of ,of effective churches, a building form for his regard for "the sincere expression" of which a bit of poetry is often appropriate. a building's structure: "One can regard There are churches among the mod- this sincerity as a sort of moral duty." ern style's best buildings, even among its Whether one shares this rather extreme earliest buildings, and they have much to regard, such structural sincerity can certell us about modernism's scope and tainly be seen in the Muskegon church, flexibility. Frank Lloyd Wright's 1906 built in 1967. The form of the church's Unitarian Church in Oak Park, Illinois, exterior is exactly the form of its interior, was not only one of the very earliest ex- and this extraordinary form-a pair of twisted planes called hyperbolic paraamples of building with exposed poured concrete, but also one of the very earliest boloids for its two major sides, and trapezoids for its end walls and roof-is buildings that could be called modern. also its structure, the twisting of the Wright recalled in his 1932 autobiography the spirit that had shaped that planes adding structural rigidity as well as church: It needed no columns, no butmolding the enclosed space. This dramatresses, and no obvious symbols. "Why tic molding, however, practically squeezthe steeple of the little white church?" he ing the congregation's attention toward asked. "Why point to heaven?" No, what the altar, leaves no doubt about the he thought the church needed, and what space's spec.ial character or about its he gave it, was a "noble ROOM-in the focus. At the same time, the building's service of MAN for the worship of geometry and structural frankness give it GOD." Wright's attitude of suiting the some degree of the disciplined severity building form to its functional needs is we saw in van der Rohe's chapel. There thoroughly the attitude of a modern are, further, graceful subsidiary ,notesarchitect rebelling against past cliches. skylights, a small chapel niche in the altar Modern architecture in the service of wall, and elements of liturgical furnithe church can be well shown by a look at ture-that are asymmetrically placed, a couple of very different buildings. The lightening the otherwise somber effect. earliest of these (finished in 1952) is a In a sense, of course, church building transcends the modern style and all parsmall chapel by Mies van der Rohe on the Chicago campus of the Illinois Institute of ticular styles, But if church design can transcend architecture, architecture can also tranLeft: The sanctuary of Frank Lloyd Wright's 1906 Unitarian Church in Oak Park, Illinois. scend church design. The modern church It is among the earliest modern churches. designs we have looked at here illumi-

Top: Broken Obelisk, a sculpture by Barnett Newman, is reflected in a pool.in' front of. a Houston, ,Texas, chapel, whic~, contains 14 paintings by akstract artist Mark; Rothko.

Above: A 40.5-meter fluted spire ,tops .the N~'rth Christian Ch'urch in Columb'Us, Indiana, designed by ,architel;t E~'ro Saariflen. !

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n.~te tge' wh~le. problem of 'modern architecture, and they show it to be more diverse, ,more expre~sive, an,d more poetic than' the' doctriidire stiffness now so much' de~ou~ced. Modern architecture h'a~ cl~arly been ,~irior~than' glass-clad o!fice tqwers' and stripped-down' white ' 60'fes. ~i h~s .pad its moment~; too, of surprise, of delight, and even of moving men to :WOFS9ip:"j : ..

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In Search

of, the Miraculous Below the rational-scientific surface of our times, intellectual and common man alike experience a deep longing for the transcendental level of experience that would satisfy man's total being. The lack of a balance of intellect and vision in our lives leads to the pursuit of doubtful cults of the supra-rational.

Over the past several years, in the opportunities I have had to travel and speak, I have become acutely aware of a restless spiritual need in the audiences I meet. They wonder: Have I a vision, an epiphany, an uncanny tale to relate?

A moment of illumination or unearthly dread, a close encounter with arcane powers ... ? It is a need, I hasten to add, which I have never tried or been able to gratify. This hunger for wonders powerfully engages my sympathetic concern, but utterly outruns my knowledge and skill. I have, however, seen it fasten upon others about me in ways that leave me sad or fearful, because the appetite can be so indiscriminately eager, so mindlessly willing to be fed on banalities and poor improvisations on the extraordinary.

I realize that the eclipse of God in our time has never been the exclusive anguish of an intellectual and artistic few. As a nameless moral anxiety, a quiet desperation, it has been festering in the deep consciousness of people everywhere, and at last it has erupted into the totalitarian mass movements of the 20th century.

Self-enslavement to easy absolutes and mad political messiahs: that is the poison tree that flourishes peculiarly in the Waste Land.

Mercifully, the metaphysical insecurity of our time does not always reach out toward such vicious manifestations. Currently, its foremost expression in the industrial societies is the rapid spread of evangelical and charismatic forms of Christianity, faiths that teach the immediate inspiration of the Holy Spirit. These highly personal, emotionally electrifying versions of Christianity are now the most burgeoning congregations of our day. In America they are fast developing an alternative educational establishment and their own mass media, which rival the outreach of the broadcasting networks.

Beyond such formal, religious affiliations, the hunger for wonders expresses

itself in countless forms of pop psychiatry and lumpen occultism which thinly disguise the same impetuous quest for personal salvation. The most widely read newspapers in the United States-weekly gossip and scandal sheets like The National Enquirer-carry steady coverage of UFO cults and ESP, spiritualism, reincarnation, and faith cures. Esoteric forms of Oriental meditation have been opened to the public by university extensions and the YMCA; they have even been organized into successful franchise businesses that promise tranquillity and enlightenment to anyone who can spare 20 minutes a day. At the other extreme from transcendental calm, there is the undiminished popular fascination with Gothic horror, which makes Satanism, demonic possession, supernatural thrills and chills one of the film industry's most reliable attractions. And there exists a busy trade in mystical comic books in our society: Dr. Strange, The Eternals, The New Gods, The First Kingdom, a pulppaper folklore of sorcery and psychic phenomena whose readership is by no means restricted to mindless adolescents.

One might conclude that at the popular cultural level such preternatural curiosities have always been incorrigibly and insatiably with us, from the mystery cults of the ancient world to the tabletilting spiritualism of the late 19th century. That would be true, and all the more to be pondered that they should survive and even flourish as a feature of modern industrial life. But more significant is the fact that the allure of psychic and spiritual prodigies has lately traveled up the cultural scale, and not only, as at the turn Of the century, in the form of clandestine fraternities-like the Order of the Golcien Dawn. We might say it has "come out of the closet" for academics and professionals who have been touched by the same metaphysical yearnings as the public at large, and who have simply

stopped fighting them off as if they were some form of unmentionable sexual perversion. They make up the principal audience for the human-potential therapies, the main membership of the Association for Humanistic Psychology and the Association for Transpersonal Psychology, organizations that offer a professional shelter where psychiatry, Eastern religions, etherealized healing, and the exploration of altered states of consciousness may freely cohabit.

Far and away the largest number of students who have gravitated to Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, and to spiritual masters like Swami Muktananda, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and the lama Ch6gyam Trungpa are maverick or dropped-out academics. Intellectuals constitute the largest public for such developments as Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' investigations of immor-tality, and the remarkably successful Course on Miracles (a new Christian

mystical discipline revealed by way of "channeled messages" to a New York University clinical psychologist). There are also the many study centers-the Institute for Noetic Sciences, the Division of Parapsychology at the University of Virginia Medical School, the Kundalini Research Foundation-which draw academic talent into the realm of the extraordinary.

I cannot vouch for the depth or quality of these efforts; what I do know is that more and more frequently I find myself at conferences and gatherings in the company of learned and professional people who are deliberately and unabashedly dabbling in a sort of higher gullibility, an. assertive readiness to give all things astonishing, mind-boggling, and outrageous the chance to prove themselves true ... or true enough. Among these academic colleagues, as among my undergraduate students, the most prom-

The Death of Socrates

by Jacques Louis David (1748-1825) oil on canvas, 51" x 44lj4".

inent laudatory expletives of the day are "Incredible!"; "Fantastic!"; and "Oh, wow!"

Let me mention only a few of the "incredible" breakthroughs and "fantastic" possibilities that have come my way lately: A prominent psychotherapist remarks to me over lunch that people sleep and die only because they have been mistakenly "programmed" to believe they have to ... and goes on to suggest how this erroneous programming might be therapeutically undone. A neurophysiologist tells me of her research in liberating latent mental controls over pain, infection, and aging. A psychologist shows me photos of himself being operated on by Philippine psychic surgeons whom he has seen penetrate his body

with their bare hands to remove cartilage and tissue. I attend a lecture where another psychologist tells of his promising experimentation with out-of-body phenomena. I come upon a physicist writing in Physics Today about "imaginary energy" and the supposedly proven possibilities of telepathic communication and precognition. I find myself in a discussion with a group of academics who are deeply involved in Edgar Cayce's trance explorations of past and future, which they accept as indisputably valid.

A historian tells me of his belief that we can, by altering consciousness, plug into the power points of the earth's etheric field and by so doing move matter and control evolution. An engineer I meet at a party explains how we might influence the earth's geomantic centers and telluric currents by mental manipulations, which he believes to be.the technology that built Stonehenge and the pyramids.

the uncertainty principle are invoked as a defense of unrestrained subjectivity; split-brain research is said to validate the status of metaphysical intuition; Kirlian photography is cited as evidence of auras and astral bodies; holograms are construed as proof of extrasensory perception, synchronicity, and transcendental realities. In recent days, I have had students spin me tales about "charmed quarks" rather as if these might be characters invented by Tolkien.

Robert Walgate, discussing books like Lyall Watson's Supernature, John Gribbin's Timewarps, Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters, and the science fact and fiction magazine Omni, has made an interesting distinction. Such literature, he suggests, is not "popularized science but a truly popular science, transformed by the interests of the readers it serves .... Like science fiction, it is much better supplied with speculation and myth than the dry, exclusive world of science that feeds it."

Popular science in this vein is not much to my taste. I sometimes enjoy its freewheeling and fanciful brainstorming, but I back off rapidly as it approaches a scientized mysticism. By my lights at least, this is a fruitless confusion of categories. Still, it is hardly within my hat impresses province to censor these rhapsodic variame about these tions on scientific or quasi-scientific strange meta- themes. The positivists among us, howevphysical fevers er, seem to have a tricky new problem on is the way they blithely appropriate the their hands: scientific superstitions, the authority of the hard sciences. In loose use of scientific ideas to appease an. these circles, far from being rejected, essentially religious appetite. science enjoys (or suffers) a smothering What I offer here is only a brief sketch embrace. There is a certain license, bor- of a post-Christian, postindustrial socierowed from theoretical physics-espety in search of the miraculous. I believe cially by nonphysicists in the academic this search can be documented at great world-which leads even well-educated length and at many social levels-from minds to believe that, since the fifth teenage acid rock to the painstaking Solvay Conference a .half century ago, all labors of scholars and philosophers to standards of verification and falsification salvage the teachings of the world's enhave been indefinitely suspended in'the dangered spiritual traditions. But even scientific community. For, after all, if this¡ impressionistic survey points to a matter is energy and time is space, then significant conclusion. If we can agree all things are one, as the Upanishads that Western society's most distinctive taught. And if the observer jostles the cultural project over the last three ceninfinitesimal observed, then the world is turies has been to win the world over to our will and idea, and one paradigm is as an exclusively science-based reality princigood as the next. ple, then we have good reason to believe AcCordingly, the revolution in mod- that, for better or worse, the campaign ern physics is freely interpreted as having has stalled and may even be losing abolished the objective reality of nature ground in the urban-industrial heartland. and sanctioned all forms of paranormal In the deep allegiance of people, in the and mystical experience. Einstein is 'secret crises of decision and commitment, understood to have established that "ev- the scientific world view simply has not erything is relative"; Bell's theorem and taken, though it continues to dominate

In the presence of such dazzling speculation, I find myself in two minds.

These are hardly things I would believe at second or third hand; and insofar as they involve physical or historical events, I am inclined to hold that standard rules of verification should apply in distinguishing fact from fallacy. I tend to welcome the clarity that a decent respect for logic and evidence brings to such matters.

On the other hand, I can so clearly hear the restless spiritual longings behind the reports, the urgent need to free the fettered imagination from a reality principle that brings no grace or enchantment to one's life, that I usually listen sympathetically, unresistingly ... though seldom credulously. This is not the course I would follow, but perhaps these unauthorized speculations can also lead to a renaissance of wonder. In any case, I am dealing here with people who learned all the objections I might raise-and didin their undergraduate years. This is clearly a postskeptical intellectual exercise for them, requiring a critical response that is more than simple doubt and denial.

I

our economic and political life.

Our culture remains as divided as ever-top from bottom-in its metaphysical convictions. Now, as at the dawn of the Age of Reason, the commanding intellectual heights are held by a secular humanist establishment devoted to the skeptical, the empirical, the scientifically demonstrable. That point of view may admit a sizable range of subtle variations; but taken as a whole, as a matter of stubborn ethical principle, it refuses rational status to religious experience, it withholds moral sanction from the transcendent needs.

But meanwhile, in the plains a thousand miles below that austere high ground, thert sprawls a vast popular culture that is still deeply entangled with piety, mystery, miracle, the search for personal salvation-as much today as were the pious marly when the Cartesian chasm between mind and matter was first opened by the scientific revolution. If anything about this cultural dichotomy has changed, it would be, as I have suggested, that the membership of the humanist elite has lately been suffering a significant and open defection as academics, intellectuals, and artists take 'off in pursuit of various visionary and therapeutic adventures. It would be my conclusion that the great cultural synthesis of the Enlightenment-Reason, Science, Progress-is in a much less secure position today than it was in the heyday of crusading positivism, the time of Darwin and Comte, Freud and Marx. (On the other hand, as I have indicated, the democratic values of that synthesis are very much with us now as a brash demand for access to the mysteries and wonders.)

It may be that the only sub:.tantial popular support the ideals of the Enlightenment and .the scientific revolution still enjoy stems from their lingering promise of material abundance-and how heavily will we be able to lean on that expectation in the years ahead?

here are two major interpretations of this schizoid state of affairs open to us. The first-I call it the secular humanist orthodoxy-would be to regard the hunger for wonders as a continuing symptom of incurable human frailty, an incapacity to grow up and grow rational that is as much with us today as in the Stone Age. Sadly, one would .con-

ecclesiastical

obscurantism,

has bred a ~cientized mysticism to appease a basically religious appetite.

elude that the masses are not yet mature enough to give up their infantile fantasies, which are-as Freud once desig-¡ nated religion-illusions¡ that have no future. As for the intellectuals who surrender to that illusion, their choice would have to be regarded as a lamentable failure of nerve. They betray the defense of reason, the cause of progress.

It is important to recognize that this interpretation of religious need as neurosis or moral weakness is deeply rooted in humanitarian values. Any criticism it may merit must begin by acknowledging its essential ethical nobility, or it will fail to do justice to a central truth of contemporary history: namely, that the rejection of religion in modern society is an act of conscience and has functioned as a liberating force in a world long darkened by superstition and ecclesiastical oppression.

There should be no question. that the service done by secular humanism in this regard is to be respected and preserved.

Then there is the second interpretation of our society's undiminished transcendent longings. It accepts that need as a constant of the human condition, inseparably entwined with our creative and moral powers: a guiding vision of the good that may often be blurred, but which is as real as the perception of light when it first pierced the primordial blindness of our evolutionary ancestors. In this interpretation, it is not transcendent aspiration that needs critical attention, but the repressive role of secular humanism in modern culture, which may be seen as a tragic overreaction .to the obscurantism and corruption of the European ecclesiastical establishment: a justified anticlericalism that has hardened into a fanatical, antireligious crusade.

The human will to transcendence, especially at the popular level, has been left without counselor guidance. Untutored, it runs off into many dead ends and detours. It easily mistakes the sensational for the spiritual, the merely obscure for the authentically mysterious. Dominated by the technological ethos of single vision, it strives to outdo the technicians at their own game by identifying psychic stunts (ESP, levitation, spirit readings, etc.) with enlightenment. It may reach out toward emotionally charged, bornagain religions that generally weaken toward smugness, intolerance, and reactionary politics. It may blunder into occult follies and sheer gullibility, discrediting itself at every step. At last, it falls into the vicious circle: as spiritual need

ed states of consciousness ... there are obviously many differences between these varied routes. Yet I would argue that they point in a common directiontoward a passionate desire to break through the barriers of single vision into the personal knowledge of the extraordinary.

All this must be seen against the background of an important historical fact: that ours is a society that has been peculiarly starved for experience as I speak of it here. It is the uncanny characteristic of Western society that so much of our high culture-religion, philosophy, science-has been based on what contemporary therapists would call "head trips": that is, on reports, deductions, book learning, argument, verbal manipulations, intellectual authority. The religious life of the Christian world has always had a fanatical investment in belief and doctrine: in creeds, dogmas, articles of faith, theological disputation, catechism lessons ... the Word that too often becomes mere words. In contrast to pagan and primitive societies, with their participatory rituals, and to the Oriental cultures, which possess a rich repertory of contemplative techniques, getting saved in the Christian churches has always been understood to be a matter of learning correct beliefs as handed down by authorities in the interpretation of scripture.

Philosophy has shared this same litern the most general terms, what al bias. True, Descartes, at the outset of we face in the tragic stand-off the modern period, developed his inbetween single vision and spir- fluential method by way of attentive itual need is the place of experi- introspection. Even so, his approach is a ence in the life of the mind. "Experience" set of logical deductions intended for is not an easy word to use here; I take it publication. Philosophy has not gone on up for lack of any better term, recogniz- from there to create systematic disciing that it sprawls troublesomely toward plines that seek to lead the student ubiquity. What isn't an experience, after through a similar process. Instead, one all? We experience words and ideas as wQrks logically and critically from Desmeanings that stir the mind to thought. cartes' argument, or from that of other We experience another's report of ex- philosophers, writing books out of other perience. Let me, arbitrarily then, limit books. As philosophy flows into its modexperience here to that which is not a ern mainstream, it invests its attention report, but knowledge before it is more and more exclusively in language: reflected in words or ideas: immediate in the minute analysis of reports, concontact, direct impact, knowledge at its cepts, definitions, arguments. For exammost personal level as it is lived. ple, in a recent work the English positivIn the growing popular hunger for ist Michael Dummett, seeking "the propwonders, what we confront is an effort to er object of philosophy," concludes experience the transcendent energies of the mind as directly as possible, to find .. ¡first, that the goal of philosophy one's way back through other people's is the analysis of the structure of reports to the source and bedrock of thought; secondly, that the study of conviction. Charismatic faith, mystical thought is to be sharply distinreligion, Oriental meditation, humanistic guished from the study of the psyand transpersonal psychotherapy, alterchological process of thinking; and, becomes more desperate for gratification, it rebels against intellectual and moral discernment, losing all clear distinction between the demonic and the transcendent.

Accordingly, the secular humanistic establishment is confirmed in its hostility and proceeds to scorn and scold, debunk and denigrate more fiercely. But, indeed, this is like scolding starving people for eating out of garbage cans, while providing them with no more wholesome food.

Of course, they will finally refuse to listen and become more rebellious. Under severe critical pressure, the transcendent energies may be bent, twisted, distorted; but William Blake's dictum finally holds true: "Man must & will have Some Religion," even if it has to be "the Religion of Satan."

The wisdom of Blake's diagnosis lies in its honest attempt to integrate the splintered faculties of the psyche. He recognized that the "mental fight" within the self cannot be brought to peace by choosing sides between the antagonists.

To choose sides is not to win but to repress-and only for the time being.

Our course is not to strengthen half the dichotomy against the other half, because the dichotomy is the problem. It must be healed, made whole.

The image of Socrates in the marketplace, practicing philosophy among the populace as an act of of our culture. Isn't science grounded in physical experimentation and empirical method? Yes, it is. But as science has matured across the centuries, its experiI do not question the value of such a ments and methods have become ever project. I only observe that it is, like the more subtle and technical, ever more theological approach to religion, a "head mediated by ingenious instruments whose trip." Its virtue may be the utmost critical readings must be filtered through intriclarity, but, as the literature of linguistic cate theories and mathematical formulaand logical analysis grows, we are left to tions. As scientific techniques of observawonder: Is there anybody out there still tion grow steadily more remote from the experiencing anything besides somebody naked senses, they require the interven, else's book commenting on somebody tion of more intricate apparatus between else's book? Where do we turn to find the knower and known. Whoever may be experience-preverbal, nonverbal, sub- doing the "experiencing" in modern sciverbal, transverbal-on which the books ence, it is not the untutored public. Here, and reports must finally be based? If indeed, is a body of knowledge, supwe follow Dummett's program, such posedly our only valid knowledge of the "psychological processes" are driven out universe, which is "not for everybody"of philosophy. Where? Presumably, into except by way of secondhand accounts.

We are a long way off from the day of ~he psychiatry, psychotherapy, meditationwhich is exactly where we find so many gentleman scientist, figures like Benpeople in our day turning to have their jamin Franklin and Thomas Young, who untapped capacity for experience autho- might keep up with the professional literature and even make significant conrized and explored. tributions to basic research in their spare time.

There is a special irony to this def Existentialist philosophy has velopment in the history of science. As found its way to a larger public in the field has moved toward professionalour day than the various linguis- ization, it has become more and more tic and analytical schools, it is involved with subliminal realities, entities, or theoretical structures that, while doubtless because the Existentialists ground their thought in vivid, even understood to be in some sense "physianguished, experience: moral crisis, dread, the fear of death, even the nausea of hopeless despair. There is the high drama here of "real life," the urgent vitality that allows philosophy to flow into art and so reach a wide audience.

But there are strict limits to what Existentialism can contribute to our society's need for the transcendent. Excepting the .Christian Existentialists, the range of experience that dominates the movement is restricted almost dogmatically to the dark and dreadful end of the psychological spectrum. The terrors of alienation we find there are posited as the defining qualities of the human condition.

This is, in fact, the bleak underside of single vision, employed rather like a scriptural text for endless, painstaking exegesis. Paradoxically, we are offered a minute examination of such experience as is left over for us after the experience of transcendence has been exiled from our lives. We are left to explore a psychological Inferno, with no Purgatory or Paradise in sight beyond.

It may seem strange to include science among the nonexperiential "head trips" finally, that the only proper method for analyzing thought consists in the analysis of language.

cal" (surely the word has been strained to its limit), are yet "occult" in much the same sense in which Newton understood the force of gravitation to be occult: known only by the mathematical expression of its visible effects. Particle physics is obviously such a science of the subliminal; microbiology is only a shade less so in its dependence on techniques like X-ray crystallography. Astronomy, in its use of radio-wave, X-ray, and gamma-ray observation, in its reliance on advanced physical theory, becomes ever more preoccupied with bodies, vibrations, processes beyond the range of direct visibility. These are no longer fields of study that can be explored by those lacking special training and elaborate apparatus; often even ordinary language will not cope with their subtleties.

For that matter, much the same tendency toward the subliminal can be seen in psychology and the newer human sciences like semiotics, or structural linguistics and anthropology, or highly statistical forms of sociology. These too tend to relocate their realities in exotic theoretical realms that defy common sense and the evidence of ordinary experience. In search of the foundations of human conduct, they burrow into unconscious instincts, into hidden structures of language and the brain. Currently, the sociobiologists are busy tracing human

citizenship, may be the ideal for bringing about a unity of intellect -and vision in the public realm. motivations to the subliminal influence of as yet undiscovered (and perhaps undiscoverable) behavioral genes.

In all these cases, the -surface of life is understood to be underlaid by deep structures that cannot be fathomed by untrained minds and that are envisaged as being of a wholly different order from surface phenomena. I grant that all these entities and forces are still dealt with by scientists as objective and physical; but from the viewpoint of the unschooled public, nature-including human nature-seems to recede into a phantom province that is nothing like the everyday world of appearances. The visible and tangible stuff around us becomes a Mayalike shadow-show; nothing that happens there is the "real" nature of things. Only trained minds can penetrate this veil of illusions to grasp the occult realities beyond.

And here is the irony of the matter. ¡Psychologically speaking, the relationship this creates between scientist and public cannot be widely different from that between priesthood and believers in more traditional societies. It might even be seen as a secularized transformation of the age-old religious distinction between the esoteric and the exoteric. And in modern science, as in religion, much that crosses the line between the priestly and public realms becomes garbled in the mind of the laity. Hence the "scientific superstitions" I alluded to earlieressentially attempts, like all religious superstitions, to wring some hint of the extraordinary from reports and verbal formulation& imperfectly understood. If I interpret the contemporary hunger for wonders correctly, it is at once a profoundly religious and a profoundly democratic movement. Its rejection of single vision is a rejection of the peculiar literalism of Western culture, and of the elitism that has dominated almost every culture of the past. It is a demand for mass access to sacramental experiences that have traditionally been the province of a select spiritual minority, and that have been "retailed" to the populace by way of prescribed rites under priestly guidance.

I will not presume to judge every culture of the past that dealt with the mysteries in this way; perhaps not all were plagued with corrupted mystagoguery and caste privilege. But surely most were, within the civilized period, where, again and again, we find priest and king, church and state interlocked as an exploitative

power elite grounded in obfuscation and brutal dominion. They betrayed and discredited the natural authority that may properly belong to spiritual instruction.

So today we are faced with an unprecedented demand for popular access to the temple, a demand that could arise only in a society deeply imbued with democratic values. That, in turn, could happen only in a society that had passed through a secular humanist phase in which all hierarchical structures had been called into question.

erhaps that is an impossible demand. If that is so, then we may see our society settle for a dismal and degrading compromise. The familiar pattern of priestly authority will regenerate itself, only now it would most likely organize itself around the sort of ersatz religion that Nazism and Bolshevism have represented, with priestly authority vested in the state, the party, the leader; and the mass rituals of the totalitarian cult would be vicious celebrations of collective power. So our industrial culture in its time of troubles might lurch from one "Religion of Satan" to another. We have had enough signs to warn us that such forms of self-enslavement remain an everpresent temptation for desperate people.

But there is a happier possibility: that we will indeed find ways to democratize the esoteric that are morally becoming and life-enhancing. And here philosophy might find a guiding ideal in its own history: the image of Socrates in the marketplace, among the populace, practicing his vocation as an act of citizenship.

We know that Socrates went among the ordinary people-tradesmen, merchants, athletes, politicians-and brought into their lives a critical clarity that only a persistent gadfly could achieve. It is this element of intellectual rigor that distinguishes Socrates from prophet, messiah, mystagogue. There is the willingness to put the uncomfortable question-to oneself and others-which separates philosophy from faith. But why was the populace willing to come to Socrates? Why were these ordinary citizens willing to face his hard critical edge? I suggest it was because this gadfly was also something of a guru: both at once at the expense of neither. Socrates placed personal experience at the center. of philosophy; he used deep introspection

as his primary tool of inquiry. There was that quality of personal attention, even loving concern, about his work that we might today associate with psychotherapy or spiritual counseling.

More than this, Socrates himself embodied the promise of transcendence at the end of the dialogue. For him, criticism and analysis were not ends in themselves: there was something beyond the head trip, a realm of redeeming silence where the mysteries held sway.

Socrates had been there and returned many times. So he was often found by his students standing entranced, caught up in his private vision. He had escaped from the cave of shadows; he had seen the Good. Something of the old Orphic mysteries clung to this philosopher and saved his critical powers from skeptical sterility. I suspect it was because he offered this affirmative spiritual dimension that Socrates found affectionate and attentive company in the agora-though, of course, finally martyrdom as well.

Just as he had borrowed his fragile balance of intellect and vision from Pythagoras, so Socrates bequeathed it to his pupil Plato. But neither Pythagoras nor Plato was daring enough (or mad enough) to follow Socrates into the streets in search of wisdom. Instead, the one sequestered philosophy in a secret fraternity; the other retreated to the academy. As these two options come down to us today, they have fallen disastrously out of touch with one another. The academy has come to specialize in a sheerly critical function; the spiritual fraternity-any that surviveshas concentrated upon techntques and disciplines of illumination that are no longer on speaking terms with critical intellect.

Can these two be brought together once again in their proper Socratic unity as an ideal of rhapsodic intellect: the critical mind open to transcendent energy? More challenging still, can that balance of intellect and vision once more be taken into the public realm, to meet the spiritual need that has arisen there? Or will philosophy shrink back from the importunate vulgarity, the citizenly burden of the task? This much is certain: We will not find what we refuse to seek; we will not do what we refuse to dare.

0 About the Author: Theodore Roszak, author of The Making of a Counter Culture, is professor of humanities at San Francisco State University.

The Challenge of

One of the most difficult, ominous, frightening and yet also joyful decisions a person can make is to abandon one career and start over again in another one. After a long-term commitment to one line of work, a growing number of Americans are making this decision-turning away from long-term commitments to take new occupations. They come from many walks of life-from schoolteaching to house painting-and they go into second careers that range from surgery to theater management.

Career switchers typically are in their late 40s, according to magazines that have examined the trend, such as Business Week and Fortune. They usually seek more challenge, creativity and independence in their work and-most important-personal fulfillment. They hold these values so highly that frequently they are willing to accept less pay, endure the skepticism of friends and risk the unknown for themselves and their families.

Remarkably few career switchers seem to be dissatisfied in their alternative professions, suggesting that the courage necessary to make such change is an important factor in the success of their transition from one line of work to another.

On the following pages, SPAN profiles six individuals who have made bold changes to second careers.

Leroy Kearney At age 46, Leroy Kearney became one of the United States' oldest medical students when he enrolled in the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, after 20 years of teaching sixth-graders in Detroit. "It was something I wanted to do and I felt I had to get it done," he says. "The hard work didn't discourage me; I like challenges. I put in 35 to 40 hours a week studying. But there was no such thing as a vacation or holiday."

Although most friends were supportive, some wondered how long he could expect to practice, even if he made it through medical school. But the prolonged ordeal payed off in 1977 when he became a doctor at 51. "It's a second chance," says Kearney, above, examining a patient. "It's a new life."

a Second Career

Wilma de Zanger For 18 years, Wilma deZanger, 41, was a photo stylist, insuring that goods shot by advertising photographers were displayed to the advertiser's best advantage. She also assisted her photographer husband and raised three children. But she wanted change. "1suddenly felt tired of being in the shadows," she says. ' She formed a mail-order company, which she describes as an extension of her own taste and sense of beauty. But first, she says, "1 had to research and learn every aspect of the business-advertising copy, layout rates, methods for shipping, postal regulations, etc." Her Ultimate Catalogue specializes in unusual items such as a 17th-century Russian icon and an 18th-century sewing chest. Her mail-order business will succeed because, she says, "I'll make it succeed."

Above, deZanger samples gift foods in her warehouse.

George Fleming

Richard Ward was 39 and the owner George Fleming achieved his dream job of a successful hardware store in Columbus, when, at 46, he became vice-president in char!

Ohio, when suddenly, "my life flashed of the construction division of Litton Industries, through my mind like a newsreel. The Lord a major American industrial conglomerate. was asking me to work for Him. " Ward But during the first year of his high-tension promptly returned to Ohio State University job, Fleming's dream soured. Although to complete work for an udergraduate he had 10 children to support, he refused to degree, and then went on to theological be locked into a career that was no longer school. In 1969 he was ordained a Methodist rewarding. He wanted instead, "something minister. He sold his house and the store in natural. " So in 1971 he opened a health food which he'd worked for 17 years, and went store named Something Natural. He also with his wife and three children to became a professional fisherman, harvesting Portsmouth, Ohio, where he took over a scallops and clams in season. Fleming small church. The pay was less than a third describes one of the advantages of his second of what he had earned from his hardware career: "When you wake up in the store. He's been serving his southern Ohio morning and say, 'Gee, what a great day fOi congregation ever since. "What's important fishing,' you put on your boots and go is not what I've given up, but what fishing." Above, he is shown on one such day.

I've gained. Now I'm in a position to help others," says Ward, shown above greeting children before a service.

"I think there is hardly a man who hasn't leaned back in his chair while at work, stared out the window and said, 'I wish I were running a little inn in the country,' or , something as romantic as that," says Richard Mela (right), who at 52 was director of corporate development for Raymond Precision Instruments, Incorporated. When his company began a reorganization, Mela saw the opportunity to pursue his dream. He resigned and opened a movie house in a converted bowling alley in his home town of Essex, Connecticut. Mela's second career is not as remunerative as his first, but is becoming profitable-it doubtless helps that his is the only movie theater in town. And he just may be the only theater manager in the United States who holds a degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Leroy Yates "Everyone was shocked when they learned of my decision to leave, " says Leroy Yates, who left his job as chief technical supervisor in the laboratories of the Chicago Medical School after spending 25 years in medical research. His friends were sure that he would change his mind for economic reasons, but Yates was just as convinced that he would not. "I knew within myself that

I was doing the right thing. " The right thing was to become executive director of the Circle Y Ranch in Bangor, Michigan, which provides recreation and leadership training for inner-city children from Chicago and Detroit. "They can find someone to replace me at the medical school," says Yates, "but these youngsters I'm helping need me the most." Above, Yates explains a game to some of the children at his Circle Y Ranch.

Old Assumptions New Realities The continuing negotiations between the developed nations of the Northern Hemisphere and the less developed ones of the Southern is an international drama without villains.

In fact, all the participants are now victims of their own pasts, perhaps of their own folly, and certainly of the most spectacular change in the structure of the world economy since the inception of the Industrial Revolution nearly 300 years ago.

Though the images of imperialistic political domination and capitalist economic control are still invoked in the rhetoric of anger and demand, the new realities of the 1970s laid bare the frailties of developed and undeveloped nations alike-and eroded the underpinning of old assumptions about who the rich nations are and how much they should transfer to poorer nations as retribution for the accidents and premeditations of history.

When Algeria in 1974 called for "a new world economic order," there was still considerable innocence abroad-in the United States, among the other developed nations, and among the developing and less developed-about how much and how rapidly the world of the 1950s and 1960s was changing. But by the time the United Nations Industrial Development Organization had met in Havana in January 1980, only snobs, knaves and the desperate believed that the power positions of the previous two decades still held. Thus, when the Third World leaders handed the industrialized nations a $300,000 million investment bill to be paid during the decade of the 1980s, the gap between the needs of the less developed nations and the ability of the developed nations to fulfill those needs became obvious-disappointingly obvious to those in need and painfully obvious to the so-called richer nations whose economies are now caught between the Scylla of slow growth and the Charybdis of inflation. For the first time there appeared the prospect of donor and donee becoming poorer together rather than improving their economic conditions simultaneously.

The basic difficulty of the industrialized nations of the Northern Hemisphere is that they have lost control over the dynamics of their own economic growth. Much of this is due to the impact of the energy crisis; but a good part of the problem stems from the erosion of their internal discipline, their propensity to want to consume, and their neglect of the need to save from current production and invest in basic plant, equipment and research in order to ensure future consumption capabilities. Consequently, - their economies have become brittle, inflexible, unable to respond quickly to changed circumstances, such as the enormous increase in their energy bills since 1973. Development imposes its .own costs; for example, in the United States the investment in automobile production facilities geared to cheap energy had to be sustained longer than wisdom dictated because return-on-investment in such facilities had to be maximized. Result: a slow reaction to rising gasoline prices and the loss of domestic markets to Japanese automobile makers whose cars were fuel-efficient.

True, developed nations other than the United States were better _able to absorb higher energy costs because they had always paid more for energy than the United States. But they

too were caught by the demand for ever higher wages, by the constant expectations of steadily rising living standards, by economic development that demanded steady growth, low unemployment, and insurance against economic adversity.

Thus the entire developed world lowered its defenses against inflation-both in the demand-pull sense whenever needs strained against available resources, and in the cost-push sense whenever discretion was pushed aside for the fulfillment of current desires. When the energy crisis hit, gradually even the energy efficient began to buckle under the strain of $14.54 for a barrel of oil in October 1979, up from $5.40 in October 1974, let alone $32 a year later, and rising above $40 a barrel.

The point of this discourse is that the developed nations' perception of their ability to help the less developed nations has been substantially altered, whether that assistance be in the form of grants, contributions to international agencies, trade concessions, or developmental investments whose purpose is not to yield a quick return. When the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) was founded in 1960, one of its stated goals was to contribute to the smooth functioning of the world economy "by stimulating and harmonizing its members' efforts ';n' favor of developing countries." But back in the 19608, the developed nations that largely comprised OECD were averaging a 4.5 percent average growth rate, and both inflation and unemployment were at the 2-3 percent levels. Trade balances were healthy. Now the OECD nations are down to a 2 percent average growth rate, inflation is moving at a 12 percent annual rate, unemployment is widespread and trade surpluses have vanished. The U.S. economic leadership is caught in a melange of monetary, trade and inflation problems. There is a surplus of steel capacity in Europe; the competition in autos, chemicals, machinery, electronics and much more is intense among the industrialized nations themselves.

Whether the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has been "fair" in its oil-ptidng policies is a moot point. The petroleum belongs to the producing nations, and so long as there are customers who are willing to pay the price asked for that petroleum, then so be it. But the rising costs of import~d petroleum pose not only a huge payments problem for the developed nations, but a horrendous one fur the less developed ones as well. The non-OPEC developing countries ended with an oil import bill close to $50,000 million in 1980, which comes to two-thirds of their total current account deficit.

Increasingly, the emphasis of international deliberations has been on how to finance the deficits of the less developed countries (LDCs) and their external debts, which for the non-OPEC developing nations now exceed $300,000 million.

What the rising costs of petroleum have done, therefore, is to distract attention from the development problems of these nations and put the spotlight on their financial survival.

Not the least of interested parties in this issue are the large commercial banks of the industrialized nations which weathered a crisis of possible rampant bankruptcies six years ago and now are nervous that another crisis ~ay be brewing. Given the rising costs of petroleum, the external debt of the LDCs could increase by as much as another 25 percent this year, necessitating another round of loan extensions and renegotiations. The world's financial institutions are awash with OPEC money, the surplus of these accounts amounting to more than $100,000 million in 1980. So the temptation is great to recycle this money through loans to the non-OPEC developing nations with something less than the usual stringent banker's criteria to guide them. The banks have not, however, yielded substantially

to the temptation, first because they had that bad scare of defaults a few years ago, and second because the structure of debt is so far stretched in their own nations that central authorities are imposing caution lest a crisis of domestic bank failures should occur. The private capital market probably will not again provide 50 percent of loans and grants to the LDCs, as it did as late as 1978.

The question where the money will come from asks more than does the question how will the developing nations survive in 1982. Between bilateral government arrangements, .assistance from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) , other development aid and investment agencies, and loans from private banks unwilling to risk loss of loans already granted, the developing nations will squeeze through as they did in 1980. But where will the money come from to bring an end to the hand-to-mouth cycle and turn things around to the point where there is sufficient financial leeway to continue reaL development? Such nations as Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and South Korea are probably going to make it on their industry and resources so long as they have access to the capital markets.

But most others will need special attention.

The struggle at the IMF since 1978 to increase that organization's commitment to "lend stability" to the LDCs has apparently been won by the developing nations, though this victory certainly will do no more than scratch the surface of the searched-for solution. A $25,000 million increase in quota contributions was approved so that the Fund could increase its lending to nations having payments problems. Significantly, a required three-quarters of the membership voted for the increased quotas. Coming on top of a Fund decision in October 1980 to allow borrowing up to 60 percent of national quotas over a three-year period, the $25,000 million quota increase expands the credit base for nations running large balanceof-payments deficits.

The Fund is out to collect money wherever it can to buttress its financial support of shaky, developing nations. Its bid to get money directly from OPEC has been mired in a political struggle over the recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

OPEC itself has not been blind to the needs of the developing nations. Multilateral and bilateral assistance has been running about $3,900 million a year since 1978. Individual OPEC nations have also made commitments to the World Bank, the African Development Fund, and the Inter-American Development Bank. In addition, OPEC has set up a $1,200 million Special Fund for assistance to developing nations.

As for the United States, it remains by far the largest donor of development assistance. It provides twice the assistance of other big donors such as Japan, West Germany and France.

The United States is also a large contributor to the multilateral development banks, and has a system of trade preferences to enlarge duty-free entry of agricultural and manufactured goods from the developing countries. This trade preference, the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP), was authorized by the Trade Act of 1974 and implemented in January 1976. The fact is that in 1978 developing countries gained much more foreign exchange from trade than they did from bilateral and multilateral aid transactions. However, in the case of GSP, 68 percent of the trade with the United States was garnered by Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Mexico and Brazil, leaving only 32 percent for the other 95 eligible countries. Moreover, â&#x20AC;˘ an increasing number of products now eligible for GSP treatment will run into competitive need restrictions as U.S.

domestic industries hurt under the strain of a sluggish economy and increasing imports.

Thus, the United States, .giant that its economy still is among all the economies of the world, is also subject to budgetary and economic constraints that are slowing the growth of its bilateral and multilateral development assistance disbursements, its support of the multilateral development banks, and its special trade provisions for the developing nations.

In sum, while this is by no means a complete catalogue of where the support money for the developing nations is to come from, even from the little that has been said here it should be obvious that not only is a quick cure for the LDCs not possible, but even a consensus between the needy developing nations and the once so-called rich nations is bound to be sketchy one at best for the foreseeable future.

A new economic order reigns in the world. Among other things, the growth rate of OPEC nations is now three times that of the developed nations. OPEC trade balances exceed $100,000 million, while deficits for the developed nations are to the tune of $70,000 million. This by no means suggests that future aid to the LDCs should be OPEC's sole responsibility.

But one can logically conclude that such responsibility can no longer be exclusively exercised by those nations that once were identified as the "rich ones." That should change the rhetoric of demand, as well as the substance of the response.

Nor are the issues exclusively between the developed nations of the North and the developing ones of the South.

There are differences among the developing nations themselves that create problems for potential donor and donee nations.

First, there are developing nations like Saudi Arabia that have oil and development needs, and the so-called non-OPEC nations that have no oil and precious few other resources to trade for their development. Then there are nations in various stages of development with dissimilar views on how to improve their lots. Brazil, Nigeria, Mexico, South Korea, and a few others, want open access to capital markets and look askance at calls for debt moratoriums. As for commodity price stabilization efforts, that depends on whose commodities are affected.

Venezuela wants the highest prices it can get for its iron ore and manganese. Iran needs both and has neither, but would like stable prices despite market conditions. Brazil and Colombia will take their chances with fluctuating coffee prices, so long as price stabilization programs do not "protect" inefficient coffee raisers elsewhere.

And there are a host of questions to be resulved about the internal policies. of some LDCs before any consensus on development aid can be reached. Budgetary controls, adequate technical skills, efficient absorption of funds made availableall these are conditions that even the best intentioned donor, be it the IMF or a bilateral loan, would insist on before increasing loans and investments. With expenditures on armaments having equal priority with developing civilian economies or increasing food production, a clarification of priorities seems in order before an order of needs can be established for the consideration of willing or unwilling donors.

Thus the North/South issue stands-regrettably unre~ solved, but it is to be hoped, due for improvement. The dialogue continues, made all the more difficult because there are no villains, only victims seeking to grasp an altered hold in a rapidly changing world.

0 About the' Aut.bOr: Haig Babian is chief economist of the Research Institute of America, a social science research organization.

Reprinted from U.S. News & World Report, . published at Washington, D.C.

WALLACE STEGNER ON

THE FRONTIER SPIRIT Wallace Stegner, novelist and essayist, has been writing about the American West for decades- winning a wide audience for such books as The Big Rock Candy Mountain and, more recently, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Angle of Repose, Here Stegner gives his views on the American heritage from itsfrontier past,

America won't ever again be the vastly hopeful nation that we were up to about 1890, when historian Frederick Jackson Turner said the frontier had ended, Before that time, there was free land and a place for people to run to; there was an abundance of natural resources that gave rise to frontier optimism, At about that time, immigration by the urban poor was at a flood stage, We were

beginning to urbanize and industrialize.

It has been steadily tougher going since.

That doesn't mean our problems can't be handled; it will just be harder.

Perhaps irrationally, I think we'll muddle through.

Everything that is specifically American is fundamentally of the frontier. As I see it, the frontier experience became a kind of bone or cartilage as it hardened in our institutions-not only politics but education and religion and much else.

The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are all frontier-based. Free institutions derived from the American experience of freedom, which in turn derived largely from free land. With all its creaks and groans, the system continues to work after a fashion. It's still the worst government in the world-except for all the others.

Some scholars say that the frontier was notable mainly for violence, oppression

of the American Indians and the plundering of resources. All those charges are true. For a long time, the belief that we had. a Manifest Destiny to expand the nation led us to ride roughshod over the American Indians. Even as good a historian as Bernard De Voto tended to think of the American Indians as he thought of the subconscious: Something dark and dangerous and irrational-a sort of ethnic id. , In the last 25 years, a lot of people have been markedly revising their attitude toward the American Indians. We have begun to think of them as a people whose genes and whose mysteries were tuned to this continent -and should have been learned from. That's all to the good. But in correcting old mistakes, we should not go so far in the other direction that we lose our respect for the courage, enthusiasm and endurance that took frontier people time and again over the next

mountain range in the spirit of endless are very earnest about it, however, and money, and you can't grow many cherries optimism. he hangs on. are good people. I know a lot of people in on an acre-but The men and women of the frontier Vermont who went into the woods in a There was a dislike of class distinctions were, in the main, people for whom the hard climate and stayed there because and aristocracies on the frontier, alwork ethic really lived because so many they liked what they found better than though people recognized differences in were down below the ground level eco- what they had l,eft. ability and character in their own way. A nomically and were scrabbling their way lot of their dislike of class differences has Not everyone in the back-to-nature upward. Even among frontrer people of crowd is going to find roots, but some been passed along to us-though by means-and there were some-the may generate their own roots, even if now we have a great deal of class optimism characteristic of the frontier what they're doing is anachronistic. consciousness. tradition led to all kinds of energetic They're working hard for a hope; they're There has developed the notion that work, with people willing t.o postpone "real" democracy means more than givnot crying foul all the time. I suspect that their rewards. ing everyone an opportunity to succeed; it they are keeping alive a lot of virtues The worst thing that has happened to worth keeping alive, by the strenuousness has led to a "no fail" situation where us today is the tendency to derogate the and hardship of their lives. everyone is supposed to succeed. It is as if work ethic. I'm a puritan; I believe in personal distinction is somehow an outI don't look upon them with contempt. work. Without that, you haven't got I share some of their feeling for country rage against democratic and egalitarian much to believe in. That's what it's that hasn't been mutilated and chewed up. principles. That is just plain stupidity. No about: working to try to improve someI guess I also share their implicit belief matter what Thomas Jefferson said in the thing. Without work, I would probably that industrialization is not the solution to Declaration of Independence, we aren"t wither away and die. . created equal, even in the matter of The frontier bred great expectationsopportunity and rights-though we and sometimes great disappointments. ought to be.

Some of that tendency lingers with us and "Everything that is specificalThroughout our history, we've been in makes us bad-mouth ourselves unduly crisis after crisis, some as bad as the one ly American is fundamentally that now seems to be developing and sometimes. As Shakespeare said: "Lilies . ,-, o the frontIer....¡ that fester smell far worse than weeds." some-certainly the Civil War-worse.

America is in a down period now, but We've had our Watergate and Teapot that doesn't mean inevitable disaster is Dome and Credit Mobilier scandals, but looking us in the face. It doesn't mean a limited number of good men whose that young people no longer have any- our problems but is the source of most of principles didn't waver or erode managed thing to look forward to or work for. Our them. Given my druthers, I'd go back to hold the country together despite those pattern is to hope for great things beyond toward a far less industrialized civiliza- who were trying to tear it apart. the next mountain range, then come tion.

Today some qf my friends get panicky I'm not sure that farmers today any about what's going on in the nation. I down to earth and accept what we have to accept. That's the way civilizations are longer reflect much of the frontier heri- suppose that I strike them as being torpid tage. It's sad to see what is happening to politically. made.

America really isn't a nation yet: the family farm, which Jefferson thought My assumption is that the wrong, when Maybe it was during the two world . was the backbone of the Republic. it gets rancid enough, will get cleaned up.

Take the Santa Clara Valley in Califor- The demagogue who rises up, as Father wars-but only temporarily, as a matter of crisis patriotism. It may take us still nia, once called "the fruit bowl of the Coughlin did in the 1930s, will eventually another couple of hundred years to be a world." Two-thirds of the fruit grown for be given enough rope to hang himself nation. Certainly it will take us a couple world markets came right out of. that politically. It has always happened. of hundred years to be a civilization .â&#x20AC;˘ valley. Incredible! In the' spring, it was a Maybe someday it won't. apples, cherries, A lot of people today are trying to sea of blossoms-pears, But I never expect to see a revolution plums, prunes. Now that's all but gone, in the United States. I don't expect to see recover at least some of the frontier traditions. They go up to rural or wilder- and whatever's left that isn't a subdivision the kind of organized and universal ness areas in Oregon and Alaska and is likely to be owned by a big outfit and violence that means a revolution-as in Iran, for instance-where injustices places like Sandpoint, Idaho. The Rocky run like a factory.

There's a place called Sunnyvale; it's a have been so great and grudges so bitter Mountains are full of people fleeing the rat race-or so they think. One thing town of maybe 100,000-part of the local that everybody joins the revolution or at they keep saying: "I've got to find a place conurbia. Right in the heart of that town least goes along. that's really a place, not every place is its last remaining cherry packer, a I agree with Robert Frost, who said, else. " You find them all through the mulish Swede who still packs the best "We've got a ramshackle government: cherries in the world. He's going to go on The harder you ram it, the firmer it Rockies.

Some of these people are frivolous, doing it until he dies, instead of selling his shackles." That's probably true-though living off food stamps or trust funds and land, which probably would bring some- it rattles a hell of a lot in between 0 trying to be pioneers without risk. A lot thing like $200,000 an acre. That's a lot of rams.

r

Walt Disney was not merely the creator of Mickey Mouse and the architect of the world's most popular recreation spot, Disneyland.

By raising the medium of animation to a polished art form, he was responsible for one of the major media developments of this decade.

During his lifetime (1901-1966), Walter Elias Disney (left) made the world a livelier place for children to have fun in, with his film productions of classics like Sleeping Beauty (above, left). and

his creation of Disneyland, a large amusement park in California, where Cinderella's castle (above, with a display offireworks) and other images from a child's fantasy world come alive.

ho is the most widely known American of all time? A recent poll came up not with the name of Abraham Lincoln or eV,en Elvis Presley, but with two inhabitants of Amer~ ica's mythological fantasyland: Mickey Mouse and Superman tied for top place.

Mickey's ubiquitous image looms so large, in fact, that it's easy to lose sight of Walt Disney, the creator of the myth, the human personality behind the Mouse's wide smile and the little-boy voice on the soundtrack speaking for Mickey. Yet, a fresh look at Disney's achievements in the realm of animated film reveals an influence that goes far beyond the creation of a lovable mouse to include the raising of the medium to an art form and the pushing of its technical possibilities to extremes of inventiveness.

It is no wonder, then, that in the mind of the man on the street, Disney often receives credit for inventing the medium itself. However, it can be argued that this honor should go to the first artist of more than 300 centuries ago who entertained his tribe with drawings on cave walls, depicting animals in motion by drawing multiple limbs on them.

Besides, the principle that makes animated films possible-the persistence of vision-was recognized as long ago as the 2nd century, but largely ignored until well into the 19th.

This optical illusion makes the viewer think he's watching a continuous flow of action while actually seeing only a series of still pictures presented in rapid sequence. The "magic" occurs because of a peculiarity of the human retina that holds onto the image of an object for a brief instant after the object has been removed. This happens whether the observer is watching a live action film or an animated cartoon.

The latter actually preceded the former by a couple of years, when toward the turn of the century, American artists came up with animations that can be recognized as such today.

Soon afterward, Edison invented the movie camera and Eastman the flexible film strip to go into it. At once the two streams of filmmaking went off in different directions, the one a marvelously haphazard form, depending for its success upon flesh-and-blood actors and a dismaying number of imponderables; the other, the most completely controlled film medium imaginaole.

All along the production sequence of an animated film there is time to back up, have a look, make changes, if necessary, and proceed to the next step in what amounts to a process of continuous on-the-spot editing. As soon as the script is ready, sound recordings are made of voices, special effects and music; then these are mixed and prepared for subsequent synchronization to visuals. A great deal of preliminary work on characterization, background and movement goes on before the finished animation drawings are traced onto celluloid sheets called eels. These are inked, numbered, painted on the reverse side in opaque colors, and sent along with the accompanying backgrounds to the animation cameraman. The processed film is finally put together from beginning to end and projected in an interlock with the mixed soundtrack.

The form demands a degree of teamwork more akin to the assembly line than to the artist's studio. It gobbles up talent as greedily as a monster in a fairy tale devours innocents, and bestows anonymity on first-rate artists whose labor turns into something quite different from their own individual work. Not many creative persons. can accommodate themselves to the cog-in-the-wheel role; still fewer individuals have the force of personality to get results from others under such circumstances. t

Disney was one of those few, and seems to have recognized the fact himself when he said: Actually Walt Disney is a lot of people. Let's put this in an honest way. This is an'organization. Each man is willing to work with the other and share his ideas. This is an achievement.

He had, in fact, summed up what is probably his greatest accomplishment, one that translated well from animated film to live action features, to television shows and finally to Disneyland and Disney World: the ability to get truly creative work out of a team of artists and technicians while being simultaneously committed to the financial success that makes it all possible.

Throughout the production process, Disney characteristically invited his staff to contribute ideas, to solve technical problems as they surfaced, and to develop characters that approached the skills of human actors. It is also true that Disney kept a firm grip on the production at all levels and that only his name remains to give credit to in the minds of moviegoers-while the actual designer of Mickey Mouse, Vb Iwerks, the actual inventor of the multiplane camera that added a third dimension to animated film, William Garity, and the half dozen or so brilliant animators and background artists who headed teams of assistants and "in-betweens" remain unknown to all but a few keen students of the medium.

That this amazing state of affairs exists is due as much to the dedication Disney wrung from his staff as it is to his own way of looking at the world as something that-like a messy desk or drawing board-needs tidying up, that requires order, and needs above all organization. Although nothing very new is to be found in this idea, what is unique is that Disney made it work. In the late Twenties it was as if the comparatively new medium of the animated cartoon was just waiting for Disney to come along, like Prince Charming, to awaken it. The meticulous lover of order and control that he was, even as a young

amidst all the Hollywood hoopla of the time. It was an immediate hit. This ever-popular fairy tale about a beautiful girl, victimized by her wicked stepmother, befriended by seven dwarfs who live in a forest and finally carried off by Prince Charming to his castle, was a wise choice and gave Disney a head start at the box office.

But the introduction of human characters into an animated film posed problems never before encountered, chiefly because-up to then-the animation of anthropomorphic houn,]s and mice being easier to draw, they had been the staple of every animated filmmaker. However, even in the days of Above: The evolution of Mickey Mouse from his first public appearance silent films, Disney had made an animated short that contained in 1928 in Steamboat Willie (left) to his final appearance in the late a live actress. In that film he had had to use a difficult and 1950s. Left: Musicians regale visitors at Main Street of Disney World. painstaking technique called rotoscoping to accommodate both ------------------------live and animated figures within one frame. The process man heading west to Hollywood, made Walt Disney Mr. Right. requires a unit that projects each frame, of actors shot in live An observant student of Chaplin's pre-World War I comedy action against a blank background, from a camera onto an shorts and Melies' trick photography, his head was full of ideas animation table top. Then, by means of tracings, layouts of for animated shorts, a form with which he'd already had some drawings are made that correspond to each frame of live action experience. As he traveled west by train, a mouse named footage. Disney, like a good magician always keeping his Mortimer (later called Mickey!) figured largely in his plans. secrets to himself, never actually acknowledged that rotoscopBy 1928 Mickey Mouse had made his sensationally popular ing was used in the production of Snow White and the Seven debut in one of the first sound films, Steamboat Willie, and the Dwarfs; he only went so far as to say the tracings were used "for "Silly Symphony" series had got under way. In the small studios reference." Loyal insiders said the artists could have traced the Disney rented on Hyperion Avenue in Hollywood there began figures, but seldom did so because certain adaptations were a decade of innovations, both artistic and technical. They were necessary to achieve harmony with the rest of the animation. enough to win him a place not only in the Hollywood On the other hand, not-so-Ioyal insiders insisted that the firmament, but in the wider world of American pop culture as technique was used in a wholesale way. well. Looking in retrospect at four of his most famous films, one Further problems developed when it became necessary to can see why. His most popular and influential short, The Three include background shots with numerous characters too small Little Pigs, became at the time of its 1933 release part of the to render on the standard field size of the drawing sheets. history of Roosevelt's first hundred days in office. Whether Disney's technicians then devised a new field size for the sheets, Disney intended it that way or not, the Big Bad Wolf of the film a change that meant alterations along the whole line of became associated in the popular mind with the Depression; the production and accounted for a good bit of the $1.5 million tab. plucky little pig who outsmarts him, with the old American Animation cameras were adapted further to shoot the new field spirit of facing challenges with courage and common sense. size, and a method devised for reducing drawings photograph iThe film as a whole was an expression of confidence in the cally in order to depict moving figures that would otherwise purposeful mood of the New Deal. have been too minute to handle.

Artistically, it was Disney's first big breakthrough, chiefly Striving for the illusion of reality, Disney's technicians because of his innovative use of color. The process was new at reached out toward ever greater sophistication and inventivethe time and had scarcely been exploited by live action ness, culminating in the development of the multiplane camera. filmmakers-and then had been used for the obvious purpose While Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is a technical of creating a mood. It was for Disney to recognize color's marvel, Fantasia bears witness to yet another achievement of potential for promoting movement. He seems to have been the Walt Disney: his imaginative use of sound. The film consists of first to discover that, properly arranged and composed, color a concert of widely varying classical music to which animated can flow from shot to shot as an integral element of story and cartoons-some beautifully abstract, some the best kind of can affect structural relationships within the film almost in the Disney-cute-have been synchronized. Even as early as Steamsame way that notes of music flow from movement to boat Willie, Disney had sensed the possibilities of sound in movement in a symphony. In other words, his use of color was creating the effects he wanted, but Fantasia, released in 1940, motivated by content and was not used simply for its own sake. represents the limits to which the device could be exploited at As the film's little pigs cavort, the color becomes animated and that time, limits that remain unsurpassed in scope and range to changes according to each dramatic development. The Big Bad this day.

Wolfs face literally turns blue as he malevolently blows down Originally, it was to have been a musical short for Mickey the houses of the hapless little pigs who have built their houses Mouse, who had not been seen as often as earlier, to make a of straw and mud. His face turns even bluer when he tries to comeback in. But when Disney invited Leopold Stokowski, blow down the brick house of the hero, and fails. Makers of live conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, to visit his studios, action movies paid Disney the ultimate compliment by promptthe maestro's enthusiasm was so great that the idea ly imitating his use of color. mushroomed into a full-fledged feature in which Mickey did Technical innovations in animated film followed when, indeed make a comeback, but only in one episode as "The gripped by the fascination of something bigger and better, Sorcerer's Apprentice."

Disney decided as early as 1934 to make a feature-length Ten years before stereophonic sound became a commercial animated film, the first ever attempted. Three years and $1.5 reality, "Fantasound" was developed especially for this film. million later, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was premiered Music of the Philadelphia Orchestra was recorded with several

Scenes from Walt Disney Productions (left to right): For

Whom the Bulls Toil, The Absent Minded Professor, The Fox and the Hound and Snow White and ,the Seven Dwarfs. Below, right: Mickey Mouse, Walt Disney's most popular character.

microphones and reproduced on an 'equal number of loudspeakers. Theaters showing the film had to have an elaborate sound-reproducing system especially installed. The effect was stunning. Violins seemed to rush up the aisles, kettledrums thundered from the dark comers of the hall, and flutes wafted off somewhere into the further reaches of the ceiling, while viewers sat spellbound by the wealth of visual beauty on the screen.

By the Sixties animated full-length features had become too expensive to produce, and Disney had to go into television, into live action filmmaking and numerous subsidiary entertainment enterprises in order to stay on top financially-a feat he managed in spite of temporary and colossal losses. The Sleeping Beauty, produced at a cost of $6 million, was one such.

It was a flop at the box office when first released in 1959 and in 1970, when it was again tried on the public. It was not until a third release in 1979 that the film got fans into the theaters. By this time, fantasy was enjoying a comeback with a public nostalgically hankering for the long-ago and far-away where there were no such things as energy crises and inflation.

However, many of the artists of Disney's studios had long regarded The Sleeping Beauty as the climax of 40 years of Disney's experiments with the medium.

This version of yet another famous fairy tale, in which a Prince Charming awakens a princess from a deathlike sleep, is remembered for its visual opulence and its stylized grandeur. It is further unique in its uncompromising rejection of the cute and the coy, two elements of Disney that serious film critics have consistently gagged on. Disney wanted the drawings to rival anything story books had to offer. As a result, the film went into one million finished drawings. Eric Larson, who directed two-thirds of the film, said in an interview on the occasion of its last release that The Sleeping Beauty would cost $16-18 million to produce today. "But where would you get the talent?" he asked. "The Disney staff was at the height of its powers then. Since 1934 we had been drawn into a world of work, study and perfection because of Walt; animators today just don't have that experience."

Nor that kind of platform from which to reach an audience.

The Hollywood of the pre-World War II, pretelevision Thirties was a Jar different scene. Moviemakers of the time were keenly aware of their power to attract the attention of the public; film dominated every other medium in defining values and setting standards; They felt the need to counter the cultural threat 'posed to traditional American values by the rise of Hitler in Europe and the economic depression at home. A revitalization

of America's mythology, the American dream, was the answer.

Producers understood what they were about.

No one knew his job better than Disney, one of the first to get on the bandwagon. Critics have noted his quick shift in style midway in the Thirties from that of pure fantasy, the world of the early Mickey Mouse, Minnie and Pluto, where there was no fixed order of things, and the outlandish had its day-to that of an idealized world of beginnings and endings that had consequences and that bore the message that the world has rules and you'd better stick to them. The sentimental formula soon took over. Creatures became more anthropomorphic and adorable.

Mickey Mouse, for example, meJamorphosed from the mischievous and slightly cruel rodent of Steamboat Willie days into the winsome little-boy mouse of later films. Further into the Thirties Donald Duck emerged as a spicy foil to the mouse who , had gone bland and respectable. Disney had to admit at the time that "Mickey's so much of an institution that we're limited in what we can do with him."

Further evidence of the deliberateness with which the Disney Studios went about their business rings clear in Disney's frank declaration that "Others haven't understood the public.

We developed a psychological approach to everything we do here. We seem to know when to 'tap the heart.'"

He might have added "the mind" too, for intellectuals found his animated cartoons as delightful as the general public did. This universal appeal makes Disney cartoons important; it fixes them in the mainstream of American folk humor-with their tall tale extravagance, their outrageous hyperbole and even their element of the grotesque.

But a few dissenting voices can be heard above the applause. James Agee, movie critic for Time magazine during the Forties, felt Disney had lost his stride during the interruption to normal filmmaking occasioned by World War II, and that he never quite regained it. Agee also objected to being manipulated emotionally, feeling that most of the time Disney was trying to put something over on him.

Social historian Robert Sklar puts it in different terms, but his criticism is essentially the same when he claims that by the end of the Thirties the borders of fantasy had closed, that the time had come for all viewers to dream only Walt Disney's dreams, not their own. Disney's press agents, looking at the very same phenomenon, proudly coined a word for it, imagineering, a term that describes what his later cartoons were carefully designed to do: structure the entire effects so that there is no room for misinterpretation on the viewer's partbut no room for his own imagination to operate, either. .

The same concept later oiled the wheels of the controlled environments of Disneyland and Disney World where the spectator goes through a series of dramatically engineered tableau peopled by animated robots and seeing at any given moment only what Disney's engineers have decided he'll see.

These neat, organized dreamlands are indeed the palpable outcome of Disneyfs vision, persisting as it did through all the experimenting, the compulsive supervising of the animated films of the Thirties and Forties, the move into television in the Fifties and the restless pursuit of each as each, in turn, exhausted the possibilities of control. With the creation of these gigantic parks the world of animated cartoon was brought out of the theaters and into our lives. In Disneyland and Disney World we all become actors for awhile, sharing the giant screens with Mickey Mouse, Peter Pan and Dumbo.

We throng the magic paths to Cinderella's Castle, sail to the Pirates' Cove and ride the monorail to Tomorrowland.

But Disney, the human personality behind the grand show, still eludes us. Perhaps he wanted it that way, for like an old artificer "explaining" his bag of tricks, he only leaves us all the more puzzled: You see, I'm not Disney any more. I used to be Disney, but now Disney is something we've built up over all these years. It stands for something and you don't have to explain what it is to the public. They know what Disney is when they hear about our films or go to Disneyland.

They know they're gonna get a certain quality, a certain kind of entertainment, and that's who 0 Disney is.

About the Author: Jacquelin Singh is the author of several t<:tionand nonfiction books for the young. She is a frequent contributor to SPAN.

hat do you do about death-in this case, the death of an old father? If you're a modern person, sixty years of age, and a man who's been around, like Woody Selbst, what do you do? Take this matter of mourning, and take it against a contemporary background. How, against a contemporary background, do you mourn an octogenarian father, nearly blind, his heart enlarged, his lungs filling with fluid, who creeps, stumbles, gives off the odors, the mol~iness or gassiness of old men. I mean! As Woody put it, be realistic. Think what times these are. The papers daily give it to you-the Lufthansa pilot in Aden is described by the hostages on his knees, begging the Palestinian terrorists not to execute him, but they shoot him 'through the head.

Later they themselves are killed. And still others shoot others, or shoot themselves. That's what you read in the press, see on the tube, mention at dinner. We know now what goes daily through the whole of the human community, like a global death-peristalsis.

Woody, a businessman in South Chicago, was not an ignorant person. He knew more such phrases than you would expect a tile contractor (offices, lobbies, lavatories) to know. The kind of knowledge he had was not the kind for which you get academic degrees. Although Woody had studied for two years in a seminary, preparing to be a minister. Two years of college during the Depression was more than most high-school graduates could afford.

After that, in his own vital, picturesque, original way (Morris, his old man, was also, in his days of nature, vital and picturesque) Woody had read up on many subjects, subscribed to Science and other magazines that gave real information, and had taken night courses at De Paul and Northwestern in ecology, criminology, existentialism. Also he had travelled extensively in Japan, Mexico, attd Africa, and there was an African experience that was especially relevant to mourning. It was this: On a launch near the Murchison Falls in Uganda, he had seen a buffalo calf seized by a crocodile from the bank of the White Nile. There were giraffes along the tropical river, and hippopotamuses, and baboons, and flamingos and other brilliant birds crossing the bright air in the heat of the morning, when the calf, stepping into the river to drink, was grabbed by the hoof and dragged down. The parent buffaloes couldn't figure it out. Under the water the calf still threshed, fought, churned the

mud. Woody, the robust traveller, took this in as he sailed by, and to him it looked as'if the parent cattle were asking each other dumbly what had happened.

He chose to assume that there was pain in this, he read brute grief into it. On the White Nile, Woody had the impression that he had gone back to the pre- Adamite past, and he brought reflections on his impression home to South Chicago. He brought also a bundle of hashish from Kampala. In this he took a chance with the customs inspectors, banking perhaps on his broad build, frank face, high color.

He didn't look like a wrongdoer, a bad guy; he looked like a good guy. But he liked taking chances. Risk was a wonderful stimulus. He threw down his trenchcoat on the customs counter. If the inspectors search~~_th~P2<:kets, he was prepared to say that the coat wasn't his.

But he got away with it, and the Thanksgiving turkey was stuffed with hashish.

This was much enjoyed. That was practically the last feast at which Pop, who also relished risk or defiance, was present.

The hashish Woody had tried to raise in his back yard from the Africa seeds didn't take. But behind his warehouse, where the Lincoln Continental was parked, he kept a patch of marijuana. There was no harm at all in Woody but he didn't like being entirely within the law. It was simply a question of self-respect. fier

that Thanksgiving, Pop gradually sank as if he had a slow leak. This went on for some years. In and out of the hospital, he dwindled, his mind wandered, he couldn't even concentrate enough to complain, except in exceptional moments on the Sundays Woody regularly devoted to him. Morris, an amateur who once was taken seriously by Willie Hoppe, the great pro himself, couldn't execute the simplest billiard shots anymore. He could only conceive shots; he began to theorize about impossible three-cushion combinations.

Halina, the Polish woman with whom Morris had lived for over forty years as man and wife, was too old herself now to run to the hospital. So Woody had to do it. There was Woody's mother, too-a Christian convert-needing care; she was over eighty and frequently hospitalized.

Everybody had diabetes and pleurisy and arthritis and cataracts and cardiac pacemakers. And everybody had lived by the body, but the body was giving out.

There were Woody's two sisters as well, unmarried, in their fifties, very Christian, very straight, still living with

Mania in an entirely Christian bungalow.

Woody, who took full responsibility for them all, occasionally had to put one of the girls (they had become sick girls) in a mental institution. Nothing severe. The sisters were wonderful women, both of them gorgeous 'once, but neither of the poor things was playing with a full deck.

And all the factions had to be kept separate-Mama, the Christian convert; the fundamentalist sisters; Pop, who read the Yiddish paper as long as he could still see print; Halina, a good Catholic.

Woody, the seminary forty years behind him, described himself as an agnostic. Pop had no more religion than you could find in the Yiddish paper, but he made Woody promise to bury him among Jews, and that was where he lay now, in the I:Jawaiian shirt Woody had bought for him at the diers' convention in Honolulu.

Woody would allow no undertaker's assistant to dress him but came to the parlor and buttoned the stiff into the shirt himself, and the old man went down looking like Ben-Gurion in a simple wooden coffin, sure to rot fast. That was how Woody wanted it all. At the graveside, he had taken off and folded his jacket, rolled up his sleeves on thick freckled biceps, waved back the little tractor standing by, and shovelled the dirt himself. His big face, broad at the bottom, narrowed upward like a Dutch house. And, his small good lower teeth taking hold of the upper lip in his exertion, he performed the final duty of a son. He was very fit, so it must have been emotion, not the shovelling, that made him redden so. After the funeral, he went home with Halina and her son, a qecent Polack like his mother, and talented, too-Mitosh played the organ at hockey and basketball games in the Stadium, which took a smart man because it was a rabble-rousing kind of occupation-and they had some drinks and comforted the old girl. Halina was true blue, always one hundred per cent for Morris.

Then for the rest of the week Woody was busy, had jobs to run, office responsibilities, family responsibilities. He lived alone; as did his wife; as did his mistress: everybody in a separate establishment.

Since his wife, after fifteen years of separation, had not learned to take care of herself, Woody did her shopping on Fridays, filled her freezer. He had to take her this week to buy shoes. Also, Friday night he always spent with Helen-Helen was his wife de facto. Saturday he did his big weekly shopping. Saturday night he devoted to Mom and his sisters. So he was too busy to attend to his own feelings

except, intermittently, to note to himself, "First Thursday in the grave." "First Friday, and fine weather." "First Saturday; he's got to be getting used to it."

Under his breath he occasionally said, "Oh, Pop." But it was Sunday that hit him, when the bells rang all over South Chicagothe Ukrainian, Roman Catholic, Greek, Russian, African-Methodist churches,' sounding off one after another. Woody had his offices in his warehouse, and there had built an apartment for himself, very spacious and convenient, in the top story.

Because he left every Sunday morning at seven to spend the day with Pop, he had forgotten by how many churches Selbst Tile Company was surrounded. He was still in bed when he heard the bells, and all at once he knew how heartbroken he was. This sudden big heartache in a man of sixty, a practical, physical, healthyminded, and experienced man, was deeply unpleasant. When he had an unpleasant condition, he believed in taking something for it. So he thought, What shall I take? There were plenty of re~ medies available. His cellar was stocked with cases of Scotch whiskey, Polish vodka, Armagnac, Moselle, Burgundy.

There were also freezers with steaks and with game and with Alaskan king crab.

He bought with a broad hand-by the crate and by the dozen. But in the end, when he got out of bed, he took nothing but a cup of coffee. While the kettle was heating, he put on his Japanese judo-style suit and sat down to reflect.

Woody was moved when things were honest. Bearing beams were honest, undisguised concrete pillars' inside highrise apartments were honest. It was bad to cover up anything. He hated faking.

Stone was honest. Metal was honest.

These Sunday bells were very straight.

They broke loose, they wagged and rocked, and the vibrations and the banging did something for him-cleansed his insides, purified his blood. A bell was a one-way throat, had only one thing to tell you and simply told it. He listened.

He had had some connections with bells and churches. He was after all something of a Christian. Boni a Jew, he was a Jew facially, with a hint of Iroquois or Cherokee, but his mother had been converted more than fifty years ago by her brother-in-law, the Reverend Dr. Kovner. Kovner, a rabbinical student who had left the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati to become a minister and establish a mission, had given Woody a partly Christian upbringing. Now Pop was on the outs with these fundamental-

ists. He said that the Jews came to the mission to get coffee, bacon, canned pineapple, day-old bread, and dairy products. And if they had to listen to sermons, that was O.K.-this was the Depression and you couldn't be too particular-but he knew they sold the bacon.

The Gospels said it plainly: "Salvation is from the Jews."

Backing the Reverend Doctor were wealthy fundamentalists, mainly Swedes, eager to speed up the Second Coming by converting all Jews. The foremost of Kovner's backers was Mrs. Skoglund, whQ had inherited a large dairy business from her late husband. Woody was under her special protection. oody was fourteen years of ag~ when Pop took off with Halina, who worked in his shop, leaving his difficult Christian wife and his converted son and his small daughters. He came to Woody in the back yard one spring day and said, "From now on y<>u're the man of the house." Woody was practicing with a golf club, knocking off the heads of dandelions. Pop came into the yard in his good suit, which was too hot for the weather, and when he took off his fedora the skin of his head was marked with a deep ring and the sweat was sprinkled over his scalp-more drops than hairs. He said, "I'm going to move out." Pop was anxious, but he was set to go-determined.

"It's no use. I can't live a life like this." Envisioning the life Pop simply had to live, his free life, Woody was able to picture him in the billiard parlor, under the "L" tracks. in a crap game, or playing poker at Brown and Koppel's upstairs. "You're going to be the man of the house," said Pop. "It's O.K. I put you all on welfare. I just got back from Wabansia Avenue, from the Relief Station." Hence the suit and the hat. "They're sending out a caseworker."

Then he said, "You got to lend me money to buy gasoline-the caddie money you saved."

Understanding that Pop couldn't get away without his help, Woody turned over to him all he had earned at the Sunset Ridge Country Club in Winnetka.

Pop felt that the valuable life lesson he was transmitting was worth far more than these dollars, and whenever he was conning his boy a sort of high-priest expression came down over his bent nose, his ruddy face. The children, who got their finest ideas at the movies, called him Richard Dix. Later, when the comic strip

came out, they said he was Dick Tracy.

As Woody now saw it, under the tumbling bells, he had bankrolled his own desertion. Ha ha! He found this delightful; and especially Pop's attitude of "That'll teach you to trust your father."

For this was a demonstration on behalf of real life and free instincts, against religion and hypocrisy. But mainly it was aimed against being a fool, the disgrace of foolishness. Pop had it in for the Reverend Dr. Kovner, not because he was an apostate (Pop couldn't have cared less), not because the mission was a racket (he admitted that the Reverend Doctor was personally honest), but because Dr. Kovner behaved foolishly, spoke like a fool, and acted like a fiddler.

He tossed his hair like a Paganini (this was Woody's addition; Pop had never even heard of Paganini). Proof that he was not a spiritual leader was that he converted Jewish women by stealing their hearts. "He works up all those broads," said Pop. "He doesn't even know it himself, I swear he doesn't know how he gets them."

From the other. side, Kovner often warned Woody , "Your father is a dangerous person. Of course, you love him; you should love him and forgive him, Voodrow, but you are old enough to understand he is leading a life of wice."

It was all petty stuff: Pop's sinning was on a boy level and therefore made a big impression on a boy. And on Mother.

Are wives children, or what? Mother often said, "I hope you put that brute in your prayers. Look what he has done to us. But only pray for him, don't see him."

But he saw him all the time. Woodrow was leading a double life, sacred and profane. He accepted Jesus Christ as his personal redeemer. Aunt Rebecca took advantage of this. She made him work.

He had to work under Aunt Rebecca. He filled in for the janitor at the mission and settlement house. In winter, he had to feed the coal furnace, and on some nights he slept near the furnace room, on the pool table. He also picked the lock of the storeroom. He took canned pineapple and cut bacon from the flitch with his pocketknife. He crammed himself with uncooked bacon. He had a big frame to fill out.

Only now, sipping Melitta coffee, he asked himself-had he been so hungry?

No, he loved being reckless. He was fighting Aunt Rebecca Kovner when he took out his knife and got on a box to reach the bacon. She didn't know, she couldn't prove that Woody, such a frank, strong, positive boy who looked you in the eye, so direct, was a thief also. But he

was also a thief. Whenever she looked at him, he knew that she was seeing his father. In the curve of his nose, the movements of his eyes, the thickness of his body, in his healthy face she saw that wicked savage, Morris.

Morris, you see, had been a street boy in Liverpool-Woody's mother and her sister were British by birth. Morris's Polish family, on their way to America, abandoned him in Liverpool because he had an eye infection and they would all have been sent back from Ellis Island.

They stopped awhile in England, but his eyes kept running and they ditched him.

They slipped away, and he had to make out alone in Liverpool at the age of twelve. Mother came of better people.

Pop, who slept in the cellar of her house, fell in love with her. At sixteen, scabbing during a seamen's strike, he shovelled his way across the Atlantic and jumped ship in Brooklyn. He became an American, . and America never knew it. He voted without papers, he drove without a license, he paid no taxes, he cut every corner. Horses, cards, billiards, and women were his lifelong interests, in ascending order. Did he love anyone (he was so busy)? Yes, he loved Halina. He loved his son. To this day, Mother believed that he had loved her most and always wanted to come back. This gave her a chance to act the queen, with her plump wrists and faded Queen Victoria face. "The girls are instructed never to admit him," she said. The Empress of India, speaking. ell-battered Woodrow's soul was whirling this Sunday morning, indoors and out, to the past, back to his upper corner of the warehouse, laid out with such originality-the bells coming and going, metal on naked metal, until the bell circle expanded over the whole of steelmaking, oil-refining, power-producing midautumn South Chicago, and all its Croatians, Ukrainians, Greeks, Poles, and respectable blacks heading for their churches to hear Mass or to sing hymns.

Woody himself had been a good hymn singer. He still knew the hymns. He had testified, too. He was often sent by Aunt Rebecca to get up and tell a church full of Scandihoovians that he, a Jewish lad, accepted Jesus Christ. For this she paid him fifty cents. She made the disbursement. She was the bookkeeper, fiscal chief, general manager of the mission.

The Reverend Doctor didn't know a thing about the operation. What the Doctor supplied was the fervor. He was

genuine, a wonderful preacher. And what about Woody himself? He also had fervor. He was drawn to the Reverend Doctor. The Reverend Doctor taught him to lift up his eyes, gave him his higher life. Apart from this higher life, the rest was Chicago-the ways of Chicago, which came so natural that nobody thought to question them. So, for instance, in 1933 (what ancient, ancient times!) at the Century of Progress World's Fair, when Woody was a coolie and pulled a rickshaw, wearing a peaked straw hat and trotting with powerful, thick legs, while the brawny red farmers-his boozing passengers-were laughing their heads off and pestered him for whores, he, although a freshman at the seminary, saw nothing wrong, when girls asked him to steer a little business their way, in making dates and accepting tips from both sides. He necked in Grant Park with a powerful girl who had to go home quickly to nurse her baby. Smelling of milk, she rode beside him on the streetcar to the West Side, squeezing his rickshaw puller's thigh and wetting her blouse. This was the Roosevelt Road car. Then, in the apartment where she lived with her mother, he couldn't remember that there were any husbands around. What he did remember was the strong milk odor. Without inconsistency , next morning he did New Testament Greek: The light shineth in darkness-to [os en te skotia fainei-and the darkness comprehended it not.

And all the while he trotted between the shafts on the fairgrounds he had one idea-nothing to do with these horny giants having a big time in the city: that the goal, the project, the purpose was (and he couldn't explain why he thought so; all evidence was against it), God's idea was that this world should be a love-world, that it should eventually recover and be entirely a world of love. He wouldn't have said this to a soul, for he could see himself how stupid it waspersonal and stupid. Nevertheless, there it was at the center of his feelings. And at the same time Aunt Rebecca was right when she said to him, strictly private, close to his ear even, "You're a little crook, like your father."

There was some evidence for this, or what stood for evidence to an impatient person like Rebecca. Woody matured quickly-he had to-but how could you expect a boy of seventeen, he wondered, to interpret the viewpoint, the feelings of a middle-aged woman, and one whose breast had been removed? Morris ¡told him that this happened only to neglected

women, and was a sign. Morris said that if titties were not fondled and kissed they got cancer in protest. It was a cry of the flesh. And this had seemed true to Woody. When his imagination tried the theory on the Reverend Doctor, it worked out-he couldn't see the Reverend Doctor behaving in that way to Aunt Rebecca's breasts! Morris's theory kept Woody looking from bosoms to husbands and from husbands to bosoms. He still did that. It's an exceptionally smart man who isn't marked forever by the sexual theories he hears from his father, and Woody wasn't all that smart. He knew this himself. Personally, he had gone far out of his way to do right by women in this regard. What nature demanded. He and Pop were common, thick men, but there's nobody too gross to have ideas of delicacy.

The Reverend Doctor preached, Rebecca preached, rich Mrs. Skoglund preached from Evanston, Mother preached. Pop also was on a soapbox.

Everyone was doing it. Up and down Division Street, under every lamp, almost, speakers were giving out: anarchists, Socialists, Stalinists, single-taxers, Zionists, Tolstoyans, vegetarians, and fundamentalist Christian preachers-you name it. A beef, a hope, a way of life or salvation, a protest. How was it that the accumulated gripes of all the ages took off so when transplanted to America?

And that fine Swedish immigrant Aase (Osie, they pronounced it), who had been the Skoglunds' cook and married the eldest son to become his rich, religious widow-she supported the Reverend Doctor. In her time she must have been built like a chorus girl. And women seem to have lost the secret of putting up their hair in the high basketry fence of braid she wore. Aase took Woody under her special protection and paid his tuition at the seminary. And Pop said ... But on this Sunday, at peace as soon as the bells stopped banging, this velvet autumn day when the grass was finest and thickest, silky green: before the first frost, and the blood in your lungs is redder than summer air can make it and smarts with oxygen, as if the iron in your system was hungry for it, and the chill was sticking it to you in every breath-Pop, six feet under, would never feel this blissful sting again. The last of the bells still had the bright air streaming with vibrations.

On weekends, the institutional vacancy of decades came back to the warehouse and crept under the door of Woody's apartment. It felt as empty on Sundays as churches were during the week. Before

each business day, before the trucks and the crews got started, Woody jogged five miles in his Adidas suit. Not on this day still reserved for Pop, however. Although it was tempting to go out and run off the grief. Being alone hit Woody hard this morning. He thought, Me and the world; the world and me. Meaning that there always was some activity to interpose, an errand or a visit, a picture to paint (he was a creative amateur), a massage, a meal-a shield between himself and that troublesome solitude which used the world as its reservoir. But Pop! Last Tuesday, Woody had gotten into the hospital bed with Pop because he kept pulling out the intravenous needles.

Nurses stuck them back, and then Woody astonished them all by climbing into bed to hold the struggling old guy in his arms.

"Easy, Morris, Morris, go easy." But Pop still groped feebly for the pipes. hen the tolling stopped, Woody didn't notice that a great lake of quiet had come over his kingdom, the Selbst Tile Warehouse. What he heard and saw was an old red Chicago streetcar, one of those trams the color of a stockyard steer. Cars of this type went out before Pearl Harbor-clumsy, bigbellied, with tough rattan seats and brass grips for the standing passengers. Those cars used to make four stops to the mile, and ran with a wallowing motion. They stank of carbolic or ozone and throbbed when the air compressors were being charged. The conductor had his knotted signal cord to pull, and the motorman beat the foot gong with his mad heel. ; Woody recognized himself on the Western Avenue line and riding through a blizzard with his father, both in sheepskins and with hands and faces raw, the snow blowing in from the rear platform when the doors opened and getting into the longitudinal cleats of the floor. There wasn't warmth enough inside to melt it.

And Western Avenue was the longest car line in the world, the boosters said, as if it was a thing to brag about. Twenty-three miles long, made by a draftsman with a T-square, lined with factories, storage buildings, machine shops, used-car lots, trolley barns, gas stations, funeral parlors, six-flats, utility buildings, and junk yards, on and on from the prairies' on the south to Evanston on the north. Woodrow and his father were going north to Evanston, to Howard Street, and then some, to see Mrs. Skoglund. At the end of the line they would still have about five blocks to hike. The purpose of the trip?

To raise money for Pop. Pop had talked him into this. When they found out, Mother and Aunt Rebecca would be furious, and Woody was afraid, but he couldn't help it.

Morris had come and said, "Son, I'm in trouble. It's bad."

"What's bad, P.op?"

"Halina took money from her husband for me and has to put it back before old Bujak misses it. He could kill her."

"What did she do it for?"

"Son, you know how the bookies collect? They send a goon. They'll break my head open."

"Pop! You know I can't take you to Mrs. Skoglund."

"Why not? You're my kid, aren't you?

The old broad wants to adopt you, doesn't she? Shouldn't I get something out of it for my trouble? What am I-outside? And what about Halina? She puts her life on the line, but my own kid says no."

"Oh, Bujack wouldn't hurt her."

"Woody, he'd beat her to death."

Bujak? Uniform in color with his dark-gray work clothes, short in the legs, his whole strength in his tool-and-diemaker's forearms and black fingers; and beat-looking-there was Bujak for you.

But, according to Pop, there was big, big violence in Bujak, a regular boiling Bessemer inside his narrow chest. Woody could never see the violence in him. Bujak wanted no trouble. If anything, maybe he was afraid that Morris and Halina would gang up on him and kill him, screaming.

But Pop was no desperado murderer.

And Halina was a calm, serious woman.

Bujak kept his savings in the cellar (banks were going out of business). The worst they did was to take some of his money, intending to put it back. As Woody saw him, Bujak was trying to be sensible. He accepted his sorrow. He set minimum requirements for Halina: cook the meals, clean the house, show respect.

But at stealing Bujak might have drawn the line, for money was different, money was vital substance. If they stole his savings he might have had to take action, out of respect for the substance, for himself-self-respect.

But you couldn't be sure that Pop hadn't invented the bookie, the goon, the theft-the whole thing. He was capable of it, and you'd be a fool not to suspect him. Morris knew that Mother and Aunt Rebecca had told Mrs. Skoglund how wicked he was. They had painted him for her in poster colors-purple for vice, black for his soul, red for Hell flames: a gambler, smoker, drinker, deserter, screwer of

women, and atheist. So Pop was determined to reach her. It was risky for everybody. The Reverend Doctor's operating costs were met by Skoglund Dairies. The widow paid Woody's seminary tuition; she bought dresses for the little sisters.

Woody, now sixty, fleshy and big, like a figure for the victory of American materialism, sunk in his lounge chair, the leather of its armrests softer to his fingertips than a woman's skin, .was puzzled and, in his depths, disturbed by certain blots within him, blots of light in his brain, a blot combining pain and amusement in his breast (how did that get there?). Intense thought puckered the skin between his eyes with a strain bordering on headache. Why had he let Pop have his way? Why did he agree to meet him that day, in the dim rear of the poolroom?

"But what will you tell Mrs. Skoglund?"

"The old broad? Don't worry, there's plenty to tell her, and it's all true. Ain't I trying to save my little laundry-andcleaning shop? Isn't the bailiff coming for the fixtures next week?" And Pop rehearsed his pitch on the Western Avenue car. He counted on Woody's health and his freshness. Such a straightforwardlooking boy was perfect. lor a con.

Did they still have such winter storms in Chicago as they used to have? Now they somehow seemed less fierce. Blizzards used to come straight down from Ontario, from the Arctic, and drop five feet of snow in an afternoon. Then the rusty green platform cars, with revolving brushes at both ends, came out of the barns to sweep the tracks. Ten or twelve streetcars followed in slow processions, or waited, block after block.

There was a long delay at the gates of Riverview Park, all the amusements covered for the winter, boarded up-the dragon's-back high-rides, the Bobs, the Chute, the Tilt-a- Whirl, all the fun machinery put together by mechanics and electricians, men like Bujak the tool-anddie-maker, good with engines. The blizzard was having it all its own way behind the gates, and you couldn't see far inside; only a few bulbs burned behind the palings. When Woody wiped the vapor from the glass, the wire mesh of the window guards was stuffed solid at eye level with snow. Looking higher, you saw mostly the streaked wind horizontally driving from the north. In the seat ahead, two black coal heavers both in leather Lindbergh flying helmets sat with shovels between their legs, returning from a job.

They smelled of sweat, burlap sacking, and coal. Mostly dull with black dust, they also sparkled here and there.

There weren't many riders. People weren't leaving the house. This was a day to sit legs stuck out beside the stove, mummified by both the outdoor and the indoor forces. Only a fellow with an angle, like Pop, would go and buck such weather. A storm like this was out of the compass, and you kept the human scale by having a scheme to raise fifty bucks.

Fifty soldiers! Real money in 1933.

"That woman is crazy for you," said Pop. "She's just a good woman, sweet to all of us."

"Who knows what she's got in mind.

You're a husky kid. Not such a kid either."

"She's a religious woman. She really has religion."

"Well, your mother isn't your only parent. She and Rebecca and Kovner aren't going to fill you up with their ideas.

I know your mother wants to wipe me out of your life. Unless I take a hand, you won't even understand what life is. Because they don't know-those silly Christers. " "Yes Pop." "The girls I can't help. They're too young. I'm sorry about them, but I can't do anything. With you it's different."

He wanted me like himself, an American.

They were stalled in the storm, while the cattle-colored car waited to have the trolley reset in the crazy wind, which boomed, tingled, blasted. At Howard Stre'et they would have to walk straight into it, due north.

"You'll do the talking at first," said Pop. .

Woody had the makings of a salesman, a pitchman. He was aware of this when he got to his feet in church to testify before fifty Or sixty people. Even though Aunt Rebecca made it worth his while, he moved his own heart when he spoke up about his faith. But occasionally, without notice, his heart went away as he spoke religion and he couldn't find it anywhere. In its absence, sincere behavior got him through. He had to rely for delivery on his face, his voice-on behavior. Then his eyes came closer and closer together. And in this approach of eye to eye he felt the strain of hypocrisy.

The twisting of his face threatened to betray him. It took everything he had to keep looking honest. So, since he couldn't bear the cynicism of it, he fell back on mischievousness. Mischief was

where Pop came in. Pop passed straight through all those diviped fields, gap after gap, and arrived at his side, bent-nosed and broad-faced. In regard to Pop, you thought of neither sincerity nor insincerity. Pop was like the man in the song: he wanted what he wanted when he wanted it. Pop was physical; Pop was digestive, circulatory, sexual. If Pop got serious, he talked to you about washing under the arms or in the crotch or of drying between your toes or of cooking supper, of baked beans and fried onions, of draw poker or of a certain horse in the fifth race at Arlington. Pop was elemental.

That was why he gave such relief from religion and paradoxes, and things like that. Now Mother thought she was spiritual, but Woody knew that she was kidding herself. Oh, yes, in the British accent she never gave up she was always talking to God or about Him-pleaseGod, God-willing, praise-God. But she was a big substantial bread-and-butter, down-to-earth woman, with down-toearth duties like feeding the girls, protecting, refining, keeping pure the girls.

And those two protected doves grew up so overweight, heavy in the hips and thighs, that their poor heads looked long and slim. And mad. Sweet but cuckoo-Paula cheerfully cuckoo,. Joanna depressed and having episodes.

"I'll do my best by you, but you have to promise, Pop, not to get me in Dutch with Mrs. Skoglund."

"You worried bec,ause I speak bad English? Embarrassed? I have a mockie accent?"

"It's not that. Kovner has a heavy accent, and she doesn't mind."

"Who the hell are those freaks to look down on me? You're practically a man and your dad has a right to expect help from you. He's in a fix. And you bring him to her house because she's bighearted, and you haven't got anybody else to go to."

"I got you, Pop." he two coal trimmers stood up at Devon Avenue. One of them wore a woman's coat.

Men wore women's clothing in those years, and women men's, when there was no choice. The fur collar was spiky with the wet, and sprinkled with soot. Heavy, they dragged their shovels and got off at the front. The slow car ground on, very slow. It was after four when they reached the end of the line, and somewhere between gray and black, with snow spouting and whirling under the street lamps. In Howard Street, autos

were stalled at all angles and abandoned.

The sidewalks were blocked. Woody led the way into Evanston, and Pop followed him up the middle of the street in the furrows made earlier by trucks. For four blocks they bucked the wind and then Woody broke through the drifts to the snowbound mansion, where they both had to push the wrought-iron gate because of¡ the drift behind it. Twenty rooms or more in this dignified house and nobody in them but Mrs. Skoglund and her servant Hjordis, also religious.

As Woody and Pop waited, brushing the slush from their sheepskin collars and Pop wiping his big eyebrows with the ends of his scarf, sweating and freezing, the chains began to rattle and Hjordis uncovered the air holes of the glass storm door by turning a wooden bar . Woody called her "monk-faced." You no longer see women like that, who put no female touch on the face. She came plain, as God made her. She said, "Who is it and what do you want?"

"It's Woodrow Selbst. Hjordis? It's Woody."

"You're not expected."

"No, but we're here."

"What do you want?"

"We came to see Mrs. Skoglund."

"What for do you want to see her?"

"Just to tell her we're here."

"I have to tell her what you came for, without calling up first."

"Why don't you say it's Woody with his father, and we wouldn't come in a snowstorm like this if it wasn't important."

The understandable caution of women who live alone. Respectable old-time women, too. There was no such respectability now in those Evanston houses, with their big verandas and deep yards and with a servant like Hjordis, who carried at her belt keys to the pantry and to every closet and every dresser drawer and every padlocked bin in the cellar.

And in High Episcopal Christian Science Women's Temperance Evanston no tradespeople rang at the front door. Only invited guests. And here, after a ten-mile grind through the blizzard, came two tramps from the West Side. To this mansion where a Swedish immigrant lady, herself once a cook and now a philanthropic widow, dreamed, snowbound, while frozen lilac twigs clapped at her storm windows, of a new Jerusalem and a Second Coming and a Resurrection and a Last Judgment. To hasten the Second Coming, and all the rest, you had to reach the hearts of these scheming bums arriving in a snowstorm.

Sure, they let us in.

Then in the heat that swam suddenly up to their mufflered chins Pop and Woody felt the blizzard for what it was; their cheeks were frozen slabs. They stood beat, itching, trickling in the front hall that was a hall, with a carved newel post staircase and a big stained-glass window at the top. Picturing Jesus with the Samaritan woman. There was a kind of Gentile closeness to the air. Perhaps when he was with Pop, Woody made more Jewish observations than he would otherwise. Although Pop's most Jewish characteristic was that Yiddish was the only language he could read a paper in.

Pop was with Polish Halina, and Mother was with Jesus Christ, and Woody ate uncooked bacon from the flitch. Still now and then he had a Jewish impression.

Mrs. Skoglund was the cleanest of women-her fingernails, her white neck, her ears-and Pop's sexual hints to Woody all went wrong because she was so intensely clean, and made Woody -think of a waterfall, large as she was, and grandly built. Her bust was big. Woody's imagination had investigated this. He thought she kept things tied down tight, very tight. But she lifted both arms once to raise a window and there it was, her bust, beside him, the whole unbindable thing. Her hair was like the raffia you had to soak before you could weave with it in a basket class-pale, pale. Pop, as he took his sheepskin off, was in sweaters, no jacket. His darting looks made him seem crooked. Hardest of all for these Selbsts with their bent noses and big, apparently straightforward faces was to look honest. All the signs of dishonesty played over them. Woody had often puzzled about it. Did it go back to the muscles, was it fundamentally a jaw problem-the projecting angles of the jaws? Or was it the angling that went on in the heart? The girls called Pop Dick Tracy, but Dick Tracy was a good guy.

Whom could Pop convince? Here, Woody caught a possibility as it flitted by.

Precisely because of the way Pop looked, a sensitive person might feel remorse for condemning unfairly or judging unkindly.

Just because of a face? Some must have bent over backward. Then he had them.

Not Hjordis. She would have put Pop into the street then and there, storm or no storm. Hjordis was religious, but she was wised up, too. She hadn't come over in steerage and worked forty years in Chicago for nothing.

Mrs. Skoglund, Aase (Osie), led the visitors into the front room. This, the biggest room in the house, needed supplementary heating. Because of fifteen-

foot ceilings and high windows, Hjordis "That's right," said Hjordis. had kept the parlor stove burning. It was "I haven't got it. If I had it, wouldn't one of those elegant parlor stoves that I give it? There's bread lines and soup wore a nickel crown, or mitre, and this lines all over town. Is it just me? What I mitre, when you moved it aside, auto- have I divvy with. I give the kids. A bad matically raised the hinge of an iron stove father? You think my son would bring me lid. That stove lid underneath the crown if I was a bad father into your house? He was all soot and rust, the same as any loves his dad, he trusts his dad, he knows other stove lid. Into this hole you tipped his dad is a good dad. Every time I start a the scuttle and the anthracite chestnut little business going I get wiped out. This rattled down. It made a cake or dome of one is a good little business, if I could fire visible through the small isinglass hold on to that little business. Three frames. It was a pretty room, threepeople work for me, I meet a payroll, and quarters panelled in wood. The stove was three people will be on the street, too, if! plugged into the flue of the marble dose down. Missus, I can sign a note and fireplace, and there were parquet floors pay you in two months. I'm a common and Axminster carpets and cranberryman, but I'm a hard worker and a fellow colored tufted Victorian upholstery, and you can trust." a kind of Chinese etagere, inside a cabiWoody was startled when Pop used the net, lined with mirrors and containing word "trust." It was as if from all four silver pitchers, trophies won by Skoglund corners a Sousa band blew a blast to warn cows, fancy sugar tongs and cut-glass the entire world. "Crook! This is a pitchers and goblets. There were Bibles crook!" But Mrs. Skoglund, on account and pictures of Jesus and the Holy Land of her religious preoccupations, was reand that faint Gentile odor, as if things mote. She heard nothing. Although had been rinsed in a weak vinegar solution. everybody in this part of the world, "Mrs. Skoglund, I brought my dad to unless he was crazy, led a practical life, you. I don't think you ever met him," and you'd have nothing to say to anyone, said Woody. , your neighbors would have nothing to say "Yes, Missus, that's Selbst." to you if communications were not of a practical sort, Mrs. Skoglund, with all her op stood short but masterful in money, was unworldly-two-thirds out the sweaters, and his belly stick- of this world.

"Give me a chance to show what's in ing out, not soft but hard. He was a man of the hard-bellied me," said Pop, "and you'll see what I do type. Nobody intimidated Pop. He never for my kids."

So Mrs. Skoglund hesitated, and then presented himself as a beggar. There wasn't a cringe in him anywhere. He let she said she'd have to go upstairs, she'd her see at once by the way he said have to go to her room and pray on it they sit "Missus" that he was independent and and ask for guidance-would that he knew his way around. He com- down and wait. There were two rocking municated that he was able to handle chairs by the stove. Hjordis gave Pop a himself with women. Handsome Mrs. grim look (a dangerous person) and Skoglund, carrying a basket woven out of Woody a blaming one (he brought a her own hair, was in her fifties-eight, dangerous stranger and disrupter to inmaybe ten years his senior. jure two kind Christian ladies). Then she "I asked my son to bring me because I went out with Mrs. Skoglund. know you do the kid a lot of good. It's As soon as they left, Pop jumped up natural you should know both of his from the rocker and said in anger, parents."

"What's this with the praying? She has to "Mrs. Skoglund, my dad is in a tight ask God to lend me fifty bucks?" corner and I don't know anybody else to Woody said, "It's not you, Pop, it's the ask for help." way these religious people do."

This was all the preliminary Pop "No," said Pop. "She'll come back and wanted. He took over and told the say that God wouldn't let her." widow his story about the laundry-andWoody didn't like that; he thought Pop cleaning business and payments overdue, was being gross and he said, "No, she's and explained about the fixtures and the sincere. Pop, try to understand; she's attachment notice, and the bailiff's office emotional, nervous, and sincere, and tries and what they were going to do to him; to do right by everybody." and he said, "I'm a small man trying to And Pop said, "That servant will talk make a living." her out of it. She's a toughie. It's all over "You don't support your children," her face that we're a couple of chisellers." said Mrs. Skoglund.

"What's the use of us arguing," said

Woody. He drew the rocker closer. to the stove. His shoes were wet through and would never dry. The blue flames fluttered like a school of fishes in the coal fire. But Pop went over to the Chinesestyle cabinet or etagere and tried the handle, and then opened the blade of his penknife and in a second had forced the lock of the curved glass door. He took out a silver dish.

"Pop, what is this?" said Woody.

Pop, cool and level, knew exactly what this was. He relocked the etagere, crossed the carpet, listened. He stuffed the dish under his belt and pushed it down into his trousers. He put the side of his short thick finger to his mouth. o Woody kept his voice down, but he was all shook up. He went to Pop and took him by the edge of his hand. As he looked into Pop's face, he felt his eyes growing smaller and smaller, as if something were contracting all the skin on his head. They call it hyperventilation when everything feels tight and light and close and dizzy.

Hardly breathing, he said, "Put it back, Pop." Pop said, "It's solid silver; it's worth dough."

"Pop, you said you wouldn't get me in Dutch."

"It's only insurance in case she comes back from praying and tells me no. If she says yes, I'll put it back."

"How?" "It'll get back. If I don't put it back, you will."

"You picked the lock. I couldn't. I don't know how."

"There's nothing to it."

"We're going to put it back now. Give it here."

"Woody, it's under my fly, inside my underpants, don't make such a noise about nothing."

"Pop, I can't believe this."

"For Cry-99, shut your mouth. If I didn't trust you I wouldn't have let you watch me do it. You don't understand a thing. What's with you?"

"Before they come down, Pop, will you dig that dish out of your long johns."

Pop turned stiff on him. He became absolutely military. He said, "Look, I order you!"

Before he knew it, Woody had jumped his father and begun to wrestle with him.

It was outrageous to clutch your own father, to put a heel behind him, to force him to the wall. Pop was taken by surprise and said loudly, "You want Halina killed? Kill her! Go on, you be

responsible." He began to resist, angry, and they turned about several times when Woody, with a trick he had learned in a Western movie and used once on the playground, tripped him and they fell to the ground. Woody, who already outweighed the old man by twenty pounds, was on the top. They landed on the floor beside the stove, which stood on a tray of decorated tin to protect the carpet. In this position, pressing Pop's hard belly, Woody recognized that to have wrestled him to the floor counted for nothing. It was impossible to thrust his hand under Pop's belt to recover the dish. And now Pop had turned furious, as a father has every right to be when his son is violent with him, and he freed his hand and hit Woody in the face. He hit him three or four times in mid-face. Then Woody dug his head into Pop's shoulder and held tight only to keep from being struck and began to say in his ear, "Jesus, Pop, for Christ sake remember where you are.

Those women will be back!" But Pop brought up his short knee and fought and butted him with his chin and rattled Woody's teeth. Woody thought the old man was about to bite him. And, because he was a seminarian, he thought, "Like an unclean spirit." And held tight. Gradually Pop stopped threshing and struggling. His eyes stuck out and his mouth was open, sullen. Like a stout fish.

Woody released him and gave him a hand up. He was then overcome with many many bad feelings of a sort he knew the old man never suffered. Never, never.

Pop never had these grovelling emotions.

There was his whole superiority. Pop had no such feelings. He was like a horseman from Central Asia, a bandit from China.

It was Mother, from Liverpool, who had the refinement, the English manners. It was the preaching Reverend Doctor in his black suit. You have refinements, and all they do is oppress you? The hell with that.

The long door opened and Mrs. Skoglund stepped in, saying, "Did I imagine, or did something shake the house?"

"I was lifting the scuttle to put coal on the fire and it fell out of my hand. I'm sorry I was so clumsy," said Woody.

Pop was too huffy to speak. With his eyes big and sore and the thin hair down over his forehead, you could see by the tightness of his belly how angrily he was fetching his breath, though his mouth was shut.

"I prayed," said Mrs. Skoglund.

"I hope it came out well," said Woody.

"Well, I don't do anything without guidance, but the answer was yes, and I

feel right about it now. So if you'll wait I'll go to my office and write a check. I asked Hjordis to bring you a cup of coffee. Coming in such a storm."

And Pop, consistently a terrible little man, as soon as she shut the door said, "A check? Hell with a check. Get me the greenbacks. " "They don't keep money in the house.

You can cash it in her bank tomorrow.

But if they miss that dish, Pop, they'll stop the check, and then where are you?"

As Pop was reaching below the belt Hjordis brought in the tray. She was very sharp with him. She said, "Is this a place to adjust clothing, Mister? A men's washroom?"

"Well, which way is the toilet, then?" said Pop. She had served the coffee in the seamiest mugs in the pantry, and she bumped down the tray and led Pop down the corridor, standing guard at the bathroom door so that he shouldn't wander about the house.

Mrs. Skoglund called Woody to her office and after she had given him the folded check said that they should pray together for Morris. So once more he was on his knees, under rows and rows of musty marbled cardboard fileS, by the glass lamp by the edge of the desk, the shade with flounced edges, like the candy dish. Mrs. Skoglund, in her Scandinavian accent-an emotional contralto-raising her voice to Jesus-uh Christ-uh, as the wind lashed the trees, kicked the side of the house, and drove the snow seething on the windowpanes, to send light-uh, give guidance-uh, put a new heart-uh in Pop's bosom. Woody asked God only to make Pop put the dish back. He kept Mrs. Skoglund on her knees as long as possible. Then he thanked her, shining with candor (as much as he knew how) for her Christian generosity and he said, "I know that Hjordis has a cousin who works at the Evanston Y.M.C.A. Could she please phone him and try to get us a room tonight so that we don't have to fight the blizzard all the way back? We're almost as close to the Y as to the car line. Maybe the cars have even stopped running."

Suspicious Hjordis, coming when Mrs. Skoglund called to her, was burning now.

First they barged in, made themselves at home, asked for money, had to have coffee, probably left gonorrhea on the toilet seat. Hjordis, Woody remembered, was a woman who wiped the doorknobs with rubbing alcohol after guests had left.

Nevertheless, she telephoned the Y and got them a room with two cots for six bits.

Pop had plenty of time, therefore, to reopen the etagere, lined with reflecting glass or German silver (something exquisitely delicate and tricky), and as soon as the two Selbsts had said thank you and goodbye and were in mid-street again up to the knees in snow, Woody said, "Well, I covered for. you. Is that thing back?"

"Of course it is," said Pop. They fought their way to the small Y building, shut up in wire grille and resembling a police station-about the same dimensions. It was locked, but they made a racket on the grille, and a small black man let them in and shuffled them upstairs to a cement corridor with low doors. It was like the small mammal house in Lincoln Park. He said there was nothing to eat, so they took off their wet pants, wrapped themselves tightly in the khaki army blankets, and passed out on their cots.

First thing in the morning, they went to the Evanston National Bank and got the fifty dollars. Not without difficulties. The teller went to call Mrs. Skoglund and was absent a long time from the wicket.

"Where the hell has he gone," said Pop. But when the fellow came back he said, "How do you want it?"

Pop said "Singles." He told Woody, "Bujak stashes it in one-dollar bills."

But by now Woody no longer believed Halina had stolen the old man's money.

Then they went into the street, where the snow-removal crews wer.e at work.

The sun shone broad, broad, out of the morning blue, and all Chicago would be releasing itself from the temporary beauty of those vast drifts.

"You shouldn't have jumped me last night, Sonny."

"I know, Pop, but you promised you wouldn't get me in Dutch."

"Well, it's O.K., we can forget it, seeing you stood by me."

Only, Pop had taken the silver dish. Of course he had, and in a few days Mrs. Skoglund and Hjordis knew it, and later in the week they were all waiting for Woody in Kovner's office at the settlement house. The group included the Reverend Dr. Crabbie, head of the seminary, and Woody, who had'been flying along, level and smooth, was shot down in flames, He told them he was innocent.

Even as he was falling, he warned that they were wronging him. He denied that he or Pop had touched Mrs. Skoglund's property. The missing object-he didn't even know what it was-had probably been misplaced, and they would be very sorry on the day it turned up. After the others were done with him, Dr. Crabbie

said until he was able to tell the truth he cized Woody for it, nevertheless. "You take too much on yourself," Pop was would be suspended from the seminary, always saying. And it's true that Woody where his work had been unsatisfactory anyway. Aunt Rebecca took him aside gave Pop his heart because Pop was so selfish. It's usually the selfish people who and said to him, '~You are a little crook, like your father. The door is closed to you are loved the most. They do what you deny yourself, and you love them for it. here."

To this Pop's comment was "So what, You give them your heart. kid?"

Remembering the pawn ticket for the "Pop, you shouldn't have done it." silver dish, Woody startled himself with a "No? Well, I don't give a care, if you laugh so sudden that it made him cough. want to know. You can have the dish if . Pop said to him after his expulsion from you want to go back and square yourself the seminary and banishment from the with all those hypocrites." settlement house, "You want in again?

"I didn't like doing Mrs. Skoglund in Here's the ticket. I hocked that thing. It the eye, she was so kind to us." wasn't so valuable as I thought."

"Kind?"

"What did they give?"

"Twelve-fifty was all I could get. But if "Kind." you want it you'll have to raise the "Kind has a price tag."

Well, there was no winning such argu- dough yourself, because I haven't got it ments with Pop. But they debated it in anymore."

"You must have been sweating in the various moods and from various elevations and perspectives for forty years and bank when the teller went to call Mrs. more, as their intimacy changed, de- Skoglund about the check."

"I was a little nervous," said Pop: "But veloped, matured.

"Why did you do it, Pop? For the I didn't think they could miss the thing money? What did you do with the so soon." fifty bucks?" Woody, decades later, hat theft was part of Pop's war asked him that. with Mother. With Mother, "I settled with the bookie, and the rest ag.d Aunt Rebecca, and the I put in the business."

Reverend Doctor. Pop took his "You tried a few more horses."

"I maybe did. But it was a double, stand on realism. Mother represented the Woody. I didn't hurt myself, and at the forces of religion and hypochondria. In four decades, the fighting never stopped. same time did you a favor."

In the course of time, Mother and the "It was for me?"

"It was too strange of a life. That life girls turned into welfare personalities and lost their individual outlines. Ah, the wasn't you, Woody. All those womenKovner was no man, he was an in- poor things, they became dependents and between. Suppose they made you a cranks. In the meantime, Woody, the minister? Some Christian minister! First sinful man, was their dutiful and loving of all, you wouldn't have been able to son and brother. He maintained the stand it, and, second, they would throw bungalow-this took in roofing, pointing, wiring, insulation, air-condit ionyou out sooner or later." ing-and he paid for heat and light "Maybe so."

"And you wouldn't have converted the and food, and dressed them all out of Jews, which was the main thing they Sears, Roebuck and Wieboldt's,. and wanted." bought them a TV, which they watched "And what a time to bother the Jews," as devoutly as they prayed. Paula took Woody said. "At least I didn't bug courses to learn skills like macramethem." making and needlepoint, and sometimes Pop had carried him back to his side of got a little job as recreational worker in a the line,' blood of his blood, the same nursing home. But she wasn't steady thick body walls, the same coarse grain. enough to keep it. Wicked Pop spent Not cut out for a spiritual life. Simply not most of his life removing stains from up to it. people's clothing. He and Halina in the Pop was no worse than Woody, and last years ran a Cleanomat in West Woody was no better than Pop. Pop Rogers Park-a so-so business resemblwanted no relation to theory, and yet he ing a laundromat-which gave him leiwas always pointing Woody toward a sure for billiards, the horses, rummy and position-a jolly, hearty, natural, likable, pinochle. Every morning he went behind unprincipled position. If Woody had a the partition to check out the filters of the weakness, it was to be unselfish. This cleaning equipment. He found amusing worked to Pop's advantage, but he criti- things that had been thrown into the vats

with the clothing-sometimes, when he got lucky, a locket chain or a brooch. And when he had fortified the cleaning fluid, pouring all that blue and pink stuff in from plastic jugs, he read the Forward over a second cup of coffee, and went out, leaving Halina in charge. When they needed help with the rent, Woody gave it.

After the new Disney World was opened in Florida, Woody treated all his dependents to a holiday. He sent them down in separate batches, of course.

Halina enjoyed this more than anybody else. She couldn't stop talking about the address given by an Abraham Lincoln automaton. "Wonderful, how he stood up and moved his hands, and his mouth.

So real! And how beautiful he talked."

Of them all, Halina was the soundest, the most human, the most honest. Now that Pop was gone, Woody and Halina's son, Mitosh, the organist at the Stadium, took care of her needs over and above Social Security, splitting expenses. In Pop's opinion, insurance was a racket. He left Halina nothing but some out-of-date equipment.

Woody treated himself, too. Once a year, and sometimes oftener, he left his business to run itself, arranged with the trust department at the bank to take care of his Gang, and went off. He did that in style, imaginatively, expensively. In Japan, he wasted little time on Tokyo.

He spent three weeks in Kyoto and stayed at the Tawaraya Inn, dating from the seventeenth century or so. There he slept on the floor, the Japanese way, and bathed in scalding water. He saw the dirtiest strip show on earth, as well as the holy places and the temple gardens. He visited also Istanbul, Jerusalem, Delphi, and went to Burma and Uganda and Kenya on safari, on democratic terms with drivers, Bedouins, bazaar merchants. Open, lavish, familiar, fleshier and fleshier but (he jogged, he lifted weights) still muscular-in his naked person beginning to resemble a Renaissance courtier in full costume-becoming ruddier every year, an outdoor type with freckles on his back and spots across the flaming forehead and the honest nose. In Addis Ababa he took an Ethiopian beauty to his room from the street and washed her, getting into the shower with her to soap her with his broad, kindly hands. In Kenya he taught certain American obscenities to a black woman so that she could shout them out during the act. On the Nile, below Murchison Falls, those fever trees rose huge (rom the mud, and hippos on the sandbars belched at the passing launch, hostile. One of them danced on

his spit of sand, springing from the ground and coming dQ~n heavy, on all fours.

There, Woody saw the buffalo calf disappear, snatched by the crocodile.

Mother, soon to follow Pop, was being light-headed these days. In company, she spoke of Woody as her boy-"What do you think of my Sonny?" -as though he was ten years old. She was silly with him, her behavior was frivolous, almost flirtatious. She just didn't seem to know the facts. And behind her all the others, like kids at the playground, were waiting their turn to go down the slide; one on each step, and moving toward the top.

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the same perimeter as the church bells while they were ringing, and he mourned under it, this melancholy morning of sun and autumn.

Doing a life survey, taking a deliberate look at the gross side of his case-of the other side as well, what there was of it.

But if this heartache continued, he'd go out and run it off. A three-mile jogfive, if necessary. And you'd think that this jogging was an entirely physical activity, wouldn't you? But there was something else in it. Because, when he was a seminarian, between the shafts of his World's Fair rickshaw, he used to receive, pulling along (capable and stable), his religious experiences while he trotted.

Maybe it was all a single experience repeated. He felt truth coming to him from the sun. He received a communication that was also light and warmth. It made him very remote from his horny Wisconsin passengers, those farmers whose whoops and whore-cries he could hardly hear when he was in one of his states. And again out of the flaming of the sun would come to him a secret certainty that the goal set for this earth was that it should be filled with good, saturated with it. After everything preposterous, after dog had eaten dog, after the crocodile death had pulled everyone into his mud. It wouldn't conclude as Mrs. Skoglund, bribing him to round up the Jews and hasten the Second Coming, imagined it but in another way. This was his clumsy intuition. It went no further.

Subsequently, he proceeded through life as life seemed to want him to do it.

There remained one thing more this morning, which was explicitly physical, occurring first as a sensation in his arms and against his breast and, from the pressure, passing into him and going into his breast.

It was like this: When he came into the hospital room and saw Pop with the sides of his bed raised, like a crib, and Pop, so very feeble, and writhing, and toothless, like a baby, and the dirt already cast into his face, into the wrinkles-Pop wanted to pluck out the intravenous needles and he was piping his weak death noise. The gauze patches taped over the needles were soiled with dark blood. Then Woody took off his shoes, lowered the side of the bed, and climbed in and held him in his arms to soothe and still him. As if he were Pop's father, he said to him, "Now Pop. Pop." Then it was like the wrestle in Mrs. Skoglund's parlor, when Pop turned angry like an unclean spirit and Woody tried to appease him, and warn him, saying, "Those women will be back!" Beside the coal stove, when Pop hit Woody in the teeth with his head and then became sullen, like a stout fish. But this struggle in the hospital was weak-so weak! In his great pity, Woody held Pop, who was fluttering and shivering. From those people, Pop had told him, you'll never find out what life is, because they don't know what it is. Yes, Pop-well, what is it, Pop? Hard to comprehend that Pop, who was dug in for eighty-three years and had done all he could to stay, should now want nothing but to free himself. How could Woody allow the old man to pull the intravenous needles out?

Willful Pop, he wanted what he wanted when he wanted it. But what he wanted at the very last Woody failed to follow, it was such a switch.

After a time, Pop's resistance ended.

He subsided and subsided. He rested against his son, his small body curled there. Nurses came and looked. They disapproved, but Woody, who couldn't spare a hand to wave them out, motioned with his head toward the door. Pop, whom Woody thought he had stilled, only had found a better way to get around him.

Loss of heat was the way he did it. His heat was leaving him. As can happen with small animals while you hold them in your hand, Woody presently felt him cooling. Then, as Woody did his best to restrain him, and thought he was succeeding, Pop divided himself. And when he was separated from his warmth he slipped into death. And there was his elderly, large, muscular son, still holding and pressing him when there was nothing anymore to press. You could never pin down that self-willed man. When he was ready to make his move, he made italways on his own terms. And always, always, something up his sleeve. That was how he was.

D /

From Welfare Described by Time as "a favored intellectual at Ronald Reagan's White House," Thomas Sowell (right) is a prolific (eleven books) economic and social historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, Stanford University, California. A leader of the conservative movement among black Americans, he serves on President Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board. His three new books reflect his interests: Ethnic America, Pink and Brown People (a collection of newspaper columns) and Markets and Minorities. The last questions whether the underprivileged are more successful with government aid or without it.

Sowell was interviewed recently on this subject for National Broadcasting Corporation byexecutive producer Bill Monroe. Excerpts follow: BILL MONROE: Mr. Sowell, President Reagan's eco-

nomic plan is under double attack. Some economists pointing to interest rates and projections of deficits say it's not 'Working. Speakers at a Solidarity Day rally said that the plan is damaging working people, poor people, minorities. What is your response to these criticisms?

SOWELL: Well, first of all, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a spokesman for the Reagan Administration.

I think the general direction of the President's program is a good direction; that is, he's trying to move away from the welfare state programs and the regulations and controls of the past generation, which have created many problems. Very often, those controls are credited with the advancement of blacks, for example, or other minorities. In reality, these groups have been improving their own skills, their own education, and I think the

advancement that they've achieved largely reflects that.

Other people who have analyzed the same data seem to have come to the same kind of conclusion.

Q: As an independent economist, but one identified with President Reagan and on his Economic Policy Advisory Board, you don't want to offer any comment to the question of whether the program is working?

A: Well, it's awfully early to tell whether the economic program is working. It's barely gotten started. Perhaps in a year, we'll have some much better idea whether it's working.

Q: What about the specific attack of black civil rights leaders who say that the President has turned his back on black Americans by pulling back from busing, affirmative action, and other such social programs, who say that the President is beginning an era of retrogression for blacks?

A: I think that those civil rights leaders have unfortunately in recent years themselves turned their backs on blacks, that they are promoting things which, as I see in the polls, most blacks are not supporting; for example, quotas and busing. They're following what the white liberals are saying, and not what the black community is saying, as I gather from what I read the polls and as I go around the country and talk to people in black communities.

Q: A recent NBC news documentary showed that black people nationwide are extremely concerned about the effects the nation's cutbacks in certain social programs will have on their lives, and in some cases their very ability to

survive. Would you convince them in any way to be more trusting in a program that seems designed to benefit the rich at the expense of the poor?

A: I wouldn't accept that characterization of the program, because I wouldn't have even such small association with it as I do if I thought of it in those terms. I think that if you're going to take away anything from anybody anywhere in the whole society, they're going to be apprehensive about it, because they see immediately what they're losing. What they don't see is how this is going to help the economy and therefore help them as part of that economy.

Q: Blacks have made more progress in the last 17 years than at any other time in history, progress that came about largely as a result of the government's social programs during that period, among them affirmative action. What do you propose or would you propose as substitutes, as we see the Administration going about the business of dismantling some of those programs?

A: I would disagree with you entirely on your facts. As I look at affirmative action, I do not see blacks or Hispanics rising relative to the general population under affirmative action. I think there are a lot of assertions and foregone conclusions that are stated over and over again, but repetition is not a substitute for facts. The fact is that under affirmative action Puerto Rican income, for example, has fallen from 60 percent of the national average to 50 percent of the national average. Mexican-American income has fallen from 76 percent to 73 percent of the national average. Black income has fluctuated right about where it was before affirmative action.

When you break down the figures further, what you find is that those blacks who have education, who have years of experience on the job, are rising absolutely and relative to whites, but that those who are average and who don't have that level of education are falling relative to whites, so they are falling behind from before.

I would not date the progress from 17 years ago, the 1964 Civil I\ights Act, I assume you're talking about. I think we need to go back 10 years before that, and in the preceding decade, blacks in high-level jobs more than doubled. What we're watching is a long-run trend based upon the rising skill level of the black population.

Q: I'm curious about one thing, sir. You have criticized the press, the leadership of the black community, white liberals, and said that all of these people apparently have been talking inaccurately about the effect of these cutbacks on the black community-; yet there are statistics put out by the government that talk about incredible figures, like more than 50 percent of black teenagers who are out of work now.

Who's right and who's wrong? I mean that statistic is rather shattering.

A:, Of course, it's shattering, and it's more shattering if

you look at the history behind it. Back around 1950 that percentage was perhaps a fifth of what it has reached in the 1970s, and the reason that that unemployment has arisen, in my judgment and the judgment of a number of other people, has been that the minimum wage coverage has expanded greatly, as well as the minimum wage level itself, so that you've simply priced people out of a job.

Many people think it's wonderful to raise people's salaries, but you can't raise their salaries. All you do is prevent them from working below a certain wage level, and if the employer doesn't agree to pay that level, they simply lose their jobs. You're not making them better off; you're making them worse off.

Q: Mr. Sowell, it's not clear to me what you would specifically recommend to help those black teenagers who would like to work, I'm certain, but can't get the jobs.

A: I would recommend either that one repeal the minimum wage law-the so-called Fair Labor Standards Act-that one either repeal it, or that one have an exemption for teenagers, or, as a third best possibility, that one have some lower minimum level, so that these youngsters can 'get on the ladder, because if you don't get on the ladder, you don't rise up the ladder.

Q: What kind of ideas do you recommend either to government or to blacks in general?

A: I would recommend that more freedom be allowed.

For example, occupational licensing is one of the areas in which I think blacks have been harmed very much by government. Now, in New York City, the taxi licenses cost $60,000. In Washington, D.C., they're $200. In New York City, I see mostly white cab drivers. In Washington, I see mostly black cab drivers. No one had to lead those black cab drivers by the hand down to the license bureau.

Once the opportunity was there, they were there to take advantage of it. .

Q: What about the argument that if a group is disadvantaged, freedom is not that much help, that the group needs help, needs government support of different kinds?

A: Government support has not been effective and, in fact, has been counterproductive in most areas that I've looked at, either in the United States or in other countries around the world. A great part of the disadvantage that blacks suffer under to this day has come about by government, going back to the era of slavery, coming forward through the era of Jim Crow discrimination in the South, and even to the present time in grossly inadequate education in the school systems across, the country.¡ If those young people come out of those,' school sy~tems unprepared, it's not going to ,matter whether we follow liberal policies, conservative policies or Marxist policies.

They have to have those skills"they Have to have that, knowledge. >';' Q: Mr. Sowell, would you agree that history has shown us that when government failed,to take on those responsibili'>

After years of detailed study of the dynamics of black society. economist Thomas Sowell concludes that less government intervention would help, not hinder, the growth of his community. ties of providing for upward black mobility and equality and justice, no one did?

A: No, I would say just the opposite, that the government has been quite active in suppressing the advancement of blacks in the United States, as well as in some other countries, that the great achievement of the civil rights organizations has been getting the government off the backs of blacks, notabiy in the South with the Jim Crow laws, but in other parts of the country with other kinds of laws and other kinds of practices, and when they tried to get government to playa so-called positive role, they've not only failed but they've had counterproductive results.

Q: Do you believe that it is a false perception that many black people have, that racism is the major problem in America for them today?

A: I think that racism is a problem in America, and throughout the world and down through history. The question is, how much of the income disparities that we see can be attributed to that? The work that I've done over the past 10 years has forced me to the conclusion that far less of it than I would have thought, or that most other people would have thought, can be attributed to that.

Q: Excuse me. I'm curious about the assertion that the best thing at this point is for everybody to have freedom. In effect, the implication is that just getting the government off everybody's back, and freedom, in and of itself, is going to get people food and jobs, and probablyA: No, people are going to get their own food and jobs because they have every. incentive to do that, and they've done that. Look at the history of blacks in the United States; prior to 1930 blacks were in the labor force to a higher percentage than whites, so the notion that the government has to figure out sonie way to drag blacks kicking and screaming into the labor force just will not stand up to history.

Q: But what are you saying? Get rid of government regulation, government help, government subsidies, provide total freedom and all will be well?

A: I am saying that in those things that the government does-for example, in education-they ought to provide more freedom, such things as vouchers, tax credits or any other system that will allow the parents their option of where to send their kids to school; in the job market, not price people out of a job; in the school systems, provide a better level of education where the school s)!stems do provide it, but at the very least, allow parents the option of pulling their kids out if they're not satisfied.

Q: Mr. Sowell, you deal in your wntmgs with gaps between black LO.s and white LO.s, between black income and white income, and you seem to have a considerable expectation that those will disappear in the next several decades, particularly if government leaves the situation alone. Why do you think those gaps now exist, and what makes you think they will disappear?

A: You mentioned income gaps. I don't believe I've ever said they're going to disappear, because as long as blacksQ: The implication seems to be in your book.

A: Well, not really, because as long as blacks are younger than whites in a society where age differences have an enormous impact on income, younger groups are always going to have lower incomes than older groups. I think that the magnitude of that difference has been declining in some periods, and there's no reason to believe that it would not continue to decline in areas where there is open opportunity.

For example, the minimum wage law for all practical purposes doesn't really apply to experienced workers, in that they get above that level once they have some experience, and the unemployment rate among blacks declines more rapidly from the teen years to the late 20s than it does among whites, simply because as they get the experience, this law becomes less and less of a handicap in getting a job, and the people begin to move up.

Q: What about the LO. gap?

A: Well, that's declined for most of the groups that I've studied, once they began to rise economically and socially.

There are groups who, back at the time of World War I, had LO.s as low as or lower than the LO.s of blacks today, and as those groups found their way into the mainstream of American life, their LO.s rose. At one time, Jews in the United States had lower scores on mental tests than the American population as a whole.

That clearly is not the case today.

Q: Are you saying that if these government programs are cut back, racism will just-won't playa factor in any of the problemsA: Racism exists-I have no reason to expect racism to disappear, any more than I expect oxygen to disappear from the atmosphere. The question is not whether it' exists; the question is how much does it explain of the income differences that we're talking about? I find racism throughout the world and down through history. What I do not find throughout the world and down through history is that the groups that are discriminated against are at the bottom of the economic pile. In many cases, the people that are discriminated against are further up the economic ladder than those who are doing the discriminating.

We find examples in the United States such as the Japanese and the Jews and the Chinese, for example, and you can look in other countries around the world and find a very similar phenomenon, so you cannot simply connect those two things as a foregone conclusion.

0

ON

THE LIGHTER SIDE

"It's called a compass and always points to where Santa Claus lives." © 1979.

Reprinted courtesy of Bill Hoes! and Ladies Home Journal.

"For this I gave up a lifetime of wine, women and song?"

Drawing by Ed Arno:

©

"This is the place I was telling you about."

Reprinted from The Saturday Evening

POSI

Company.© 1981.

1980 The New Yorker Magazine. Inc.

Farming FUfo,r U the re

Whirling drums, overhead trolleys, parts of the world, are churned into vertical growing boards, saltwater irrigabiomass to produce methane gas. The tion-hardly the usual tools of agriculleaves and stems of euphorbia, a large ture. Not yet. But according to scientists genus of plants all having a milky juice, at the University of Arizona's Environare processed to produce oil. A hectare

by SANDY GREENBERG of plants can yield nearly 25 barrels of oil. mental Research Laboratory (ERL), all of these are practical, and have the potentiai ' At Puerto Penasco, ERL's Mexican to be extremely feasible commercially. And such futuristic farming field station, operated in conjunction with the University of Sonora, techniques are needed. As the world's population continues to rise scientists are harvesting halophytes-salt-tolerant plants. Research and resources dwindle, new methods of food production must be is yielding crops that can be irrigated with seawater and used as developed. New areas for growing must be found. livestock forage. Halophytes, unlike other plants which try to Approximately one-seventh of the earth's surface and more exclude salt from their systems, are able to absorb salt and deal with than 35,000 kilometers of the earth's coastlines are desert-harsh it internally; the botanical process is not yet completely understood. environments not suited to agriculture. ERL is working to change But this means that plants can work to remove salt and mineral this picture. buildup from land that has become desert, that halophyte crops can According to Carl Hodges, ERL's director, "Everything here be used to reclaim land. at the lab ... is aimed at cultivating new land, specifically the And new crops are being discovered. Of the hundreds of seacoasts, that border the desert. At ERL, we're attacking the thousands of green plants on earth, humankind depends on just 30 entire spectrum of food production. We're trying to create species to provide most of its sustenence. According to Roger self-sufficient farming complexes-interdependent systems that will Ravelle, professor of science and public policy at the University of sustain the production of food, energy and water along desert California in San Diego, eight species of cereal supply threecoastlines. As researchers, we're looking at new plant species that quarters of our food energy-and corn, wheat and rice alone have the, potential to become 'superstars,' like the winged bean and provide three-quarters of that. By developing additional the tepary bean. As entrepreneurs, we're trying to invent ways of plants as potential crops, we can help to ease our dependency increasing production with existing crops in new environmentson the few food plants now harvested. Some of these crops will raising saltwater peneid shrimp in aquaculture farms, for instancebe halophytes. and making them economically viable."

Next to the green halophyte plots are long aquacells-curved In a couple of plastic greenhouses in the desert near Tucson, plastic greenhouses with a new use. Each contains two shrimp Arizona, imaginative visions are becoming reality: raceways some 60 meters long and 3.5 meters wide. In them, A two-and-a-half-meter plastic drum revolves around a tube of shrimp are raised and harvested; far less energy and capital are light. Lush green spinach plants grow from the drum's inner wall. In required than for the' operation of a shrimp boat. Waste water an outer chamber which simulates gravity, their roots are sprayed coursing from the shrimp raceways goes on to irrigate the halophyte with a nutrient mist giving food and water. Funded by Kraft fields.

Corporation, the drum is to be part of a prototype Community of Far-fetched and futuristic as much of this work may seem at Tomorrow scheduled to open at Florida's Disney World in 1982. Its first glance, ERL and its experiments are practical, and have the applications are far-reaching. A growing environment which makes backing and support of a variety of nonprofit and big business up for lack of soil and gravity, it could be used by astronauts-or organizations. space colonists-to grow fresh vegetables in space.

The Middle East, Africa, the Caribbean, and Central and Moving trolleys circulate around the greenhouse on their South America-all have coastal deserts where commercially overhead tracks. Prolific tomato plants, their spidery roots trailing sponsored ERL greenhouses are now at work, helping to increase underneath, thrive on them. the food supply for those diverse regions.

Vertical boards of Styrofoam, covered with lettuce plants, lean In 1982, the world's first saltwater controlled-environment together in long rows-and allow for vastly increased yields. shrimp farm will open in Hawaii with the backing of Coca-Cola and Floating on a pool are Styrofoam boards holding lettuce plants. the F.H. Prince Company. Per hectare the farm will produce a yield In the pool are catfish feeding on the roots and fertilizing the equal to the yearly haul of a dozen shrimp boats. nutrient-rich water. Over the pool are melons growing on an A-frame Near Tucson, Arizona, a commercial farming company, using trellis. When the lettuce boards are removed at harvest time, the ERL-designed greenhouses, is producing two and a quarter million melons will be shaken off into the water, unbruised. kilograms of tomatoes and cucumbers annually on 4.5 hectares of Bush beans, corn and pole beans grow in alternate rows, land. This yield is up to 20 times that of open field farming. helping each other by their proximity. Beans are legumes, and so Although the problems of world food production are immense, can produce their; own fertilizer from nitrogen in the air. Corn, the vision and imagination and pragmatism of the ERL scientists are which cannot do that, is fertilized by the beans. The corn stalks paying off as they work to virtually invent a new kind of agriculture. serve as poles fot the beans.

Under the direction of Hodges, the lab is able to manipulate levels The melons, catfish and lettuce illustrate an interdependent of sunlight, control water and air temperature, protect crops from ecosystem of crops. The corn and beans illustrate intercropping. weather and sandstorms, ilnd control pests. The resulting "high Both are hallmarks ot ERL. As Hodges puts it, "Finding a use for density agriculture in controlled 'environments" is termed by Dr. everything, that's !he challenge; finding a use for every inch of space Ralph Richardson, former director of natural and environmental and every waste 'product, making the systems independent, and sciences for the Rockefeller Foundation, "one of the most advanced producing enough energy on site to power the station." and unique technologies that anyone has ever seen."

At ERL water hyacinths, a ubiquitous weed found in many In the words of Carl Hodges: "The theme of this place is combining the marketable with the possible and the practical with About the Author: Sandy Greenberg is a SPAN photo editor in Washington. the visionary. And finding new ways to feed ourselves."

0

Prolific greenhouse

"We're attacking the entire spectrum of food production.

Finding a use for everything, that's the challenge."

Senior horticulturist Merle Jensen (right) services the mechanism that allows tomato plants to thrive in a moving ceiling trolley. Strawberry plants bloom on the hanging cylinder behind him. Various other crops grow all over the ground of this greenhouse in the University of Arizona's Environmental Research Laboratory (ERL) in Tuscon, where several revolutionary experiments are being conducted to find ways of increasing world food production.

Cabbage bonanza

Growing vertically

Merle Jensen (above) exhibits a luxuriant cabbage grown at ERL. Papaya plants, part of the intercropping system, are in the background.

Intercropping makes it possible for crops to help each other out. Forexample, while corn feeds on the fertilizer produced by beans, cornstalks act as poles for pole beans. Such an interdependent ecosystem of crops is one of the principal aims of ERL.

Technician Caryl Clements (right) displays the roots of lettuce plants growing through vertical Styrofoam boards. Flourishing in a dark, moist area, the roots are sprayed with a nutrientrich mist. Many such Styrofoam boards lean together in long slanting rows at ERL; a vertical growing system leads to vastly increased yields. Here harvests are tallied by cubic foot of growing space, rather than by square foot.

Reaching high

ERL's Lisa Bates uses stilts to harvest crops growing from the ceiling. With cultivable land fast depleting, agricultural scientists are departing from the traditional linear rows planted in a bed of earth. At ERL greenhouses-which are prototype futuristic farms-lettuce and other plants growing from ceilings have yielded rich harvests.

Winged bean

Of the thousands of green plants on earth, we depend on just 30 species to provide most of our sustenance. ERL is now successfully developing other plants-like the winged bean. Each part of it-pods, flowers, leaves-is edible, and its seeds and roots have a high protein content. Pole-supported winged beans grow in Southeast Asia and New Guinea. ERL scientists are now working on a short-stemmed variety.

Heavyweights

Salt-tolerant plants

Lisa Bates records the weight of tomatoes freshly picked from an ERL' farm. A commercial farm near Tuscon using ERL-designed greenhouses is producing twoand-a-quarter million kilograms of tomatoes and cucumber annually from four-and-a-half hectares of land-a yield 20 times that of an open field.

ERL's search for salt-tolerant plants that may be edible brings ecologist Nicholas Yensen (left) to an estuarine sJ.1lampto record data on the growth of pickle weed and saltgrass plants.

One estuary plant found by ERL produc seeds that have 80 percent soluble carbohydrates. Salt-tolerant plants can be irrigated with seawater and used as livestock forage. They can also be used to remove salt and mineral buildup from land that has become desert, thus making it cultivable.

The nutritious amaranth Shrimp farm

A worker cleans a shrimp raceway in one of the eleven aquacells run by ERL at Puerto Penasco, Mexico, to raise and harvest shrimp.

To manipulate the shrimp's environment, light in each cell varies, depending on the filtering and translucency of the plastic covering it. Shrimp can now be made to reproduce by light c,ues.

Amaranth (right), which was once a major crop, had almost been forgotten till agricultural scientists rediscovered it. It has an unusually high quality balance of proteins; its leaves make a vegetable; flour from its tiny seeds-which have a nutty flavor and can be popped-makes excellent bread.

Amaranth flourishes in high temperature and sunlight.

Waheeda Rehman and Baby Naaz in Guru Dutt's film, Kaagaz Ke Phool.

FILM INDIA

HISTORICAL RETROSPECTIVE

In the second of our three-part series on Filmlndia showings, recently held in the United States, the editor of Screen reports on the historical-retrospective of the festival. The first, "Ray Retrospective .Draws Crowds in New York," appeared in the October 1981 issue of SPAN. The Asia Society and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which jointly sponsored the FilmIndia project in the United States, could very well have contented themselves with the Satyajit Ray retrospective, since Ray is already quite well-known, and with the section on contemporary cinema, which certainly deserves to be better known. But they showed a certain courage in inserting between these two sections a historical retrospective, because the 20 films included are hardly known outside India, the condition of the prints is far from prime, most of the films are not even subtitled and they are of an archival rather than gene,ral interest. In this offering, they showed good judgment, for without the historical retrospective the American viewers would not have got a true picture of Indian cinema; besides, they would have missed many fascinating parallels between the cinema histories of the two countries.

India's cinematic connections with America are longer and closer than with other countries. American distributors did a pioneering job in exploiting the sprawling Indian market and did it so well that today, although only 80 to 90 of our 9,000 cinemas show American films, these continue to be more popular than films from any other country.

The father of Indian cinema, Dadasaheb Phalke, himself acknowledged that

it was the American Life of Christ ravaging aspects of the star system as we that inspired him to make Raja Harish- know it in India were suffered only after chandra, which was the first indigenous the studio system died.

Popular actors and actresses in India story-film, Significantly, the theater on Sandhurst Road in Central Bombay modeled themselves on their Hollywood where Phalke saw the film in 1910 . counterparts, E. Billimoria, who introwas named "America-India," In the duced the vogue for "Westerns" in Indian post-World War I boom several en- films, came to be known as "the first 'trepreneurs, including Ardeshir Irani, Indian cowboy." Master Vithal, the stunt pioneer of the Indian talkie, followed the man, was called the Indian Douglas Hollywood example in giving the film Fairbanks. After a showing of 20rro, a industry in Bombay a strong infrastruc- hanger-on at the Kohinoor Studios in ture with well-equipped studios and Bombay approached Homi Wadi a with laboratories, hand-picked crews of tech- the words: "Make me a hero. I too can nicians and stables of actors, writers and jump from roof to roof like Zor'ro." Not directors on the regular payroll. India only did Yeswant Dave, the hanger-on, was quick to follow Hollywood in or- become a star, but his star-maker too was ganizing filmmaking around stars. In inspired to become a film producer with Hollywood the star-system was so Thunderbolt (Dalai Dakku, 1931). Years closely connected with the studio system later, S.S. Vas an learned from Cecil B. DeMille how to make a spectacular that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer , Hollywood's most successful company, wanted to be movie with heavy doses of morality and known as the studio "with more stars sex. Called Chandralekha, the film's campaign, conducted on than there arecin the heavens," But the promotion

FILMS SHOWN IN THE RETROSPECTIVE

(6) Sant Tukaram 1936 Directors: V, Damle, A. Fatehlal (7) Duniya Na Mane 1937 Director: V, Shantaram

(1) Light of Asia 1926 Directors: Franz Osten, Himangsu Rai (2) Shiraz 1930 Director: Franz Osten

(8) Diamond Queen 1940 Director: Homi Wadi a (9) Dr. Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani 1946 Director: V. Shantaram

(13) Awaara 1951 Director: Raj Kapoor (14) Shri 420 1955 Director: Raj Kapoor (15) Do Bigba Zamin 1953 Director: Bimal Roy (16) Sujata 1959 Director: Bimal Roy (17) Pyaasa 1957 Director: Guru Dutt

(3) A Throw Of Dice 1930 Director: Franz Osten

(10) Kalpana 1948 Director: Uday Shankar

(18)

(4) Devdas 1935 Director: p.e. Barua

(11) Chandralekha 1948 Director: S.S. Vasan

(19) Mother India 1957 Director: Mehboob Khan

(5) Achhut Kanya 1936 Director: Franz Osten

(12) Avaiyyar 1953 Director: S.S. Vasan

(20) Meghe Dhaka Tara 1958 Director: Ritwik Ghatak

Kaagaz Ke Phool 1959 Director: Guru Dutt

SPAN DECEMBER

1981

49

American lines, was on a scale unprece- untouchability, child marriage, and Indian ethos and the occasional personal dented in India, lavishly advertising the the dowry system~ American viewers statement, could be seen the seeds of the fact that it was the most expensive film to expressed wonder at the superb under- cinema of revolt that takes different date, costing Rs. 3,000,000. standing of the camera, the artistic com- forms in different countries. The wellEven in those salad days the Amerposition and framing of shots and the known American film critic Stanley Kaufican market was a constant preoccupation command of mis-en-scene in films like mann deplores that in the United States with filmmakers in India. Himangsu Rai's Kalpana and Pyaasa. Even the occasional this revolt should be against the preceLight of Asia (directed in collaboration naivete in several of the films shown dents of culture. "In discarding the inwith Franz Osten) opened with actuality heritance of art," he says, "the rebels provoked only good-natured laughter. shots of Bombay city, giving the film a The 20 films selected could hardly be discard much of the best work that the tourist appeal by taking in the sights and fully representative of a three-decade film human race has done for the very ideals sounds of the exotic East. The American era. Certainly the selection offered varied that galvanize this new rebellion." At the market was again very much in V. Shan- fare. These included: a mythological same time he believes passionately that if taram's mind when he decided to make it were not to turn its back so completely (Sant Tukaram), a stunt film (Diamond The Journey of Dr. Kotnis in two ver- Queen); a spectacular (Chandralekha), on the past, "the Film Generation," as he sions, Hindi and English. Curiously, he and a film of social protest (Do Bigha calls it, "today has the opportunity to decided that there should be a change of Zamin). Nevertheless the film historian bring forth the best and most relevant art costumes before the English language could point out several glaring omissions of the age." shots, believing that American audiences -Ayodhya In India, on the other hand, the revolt Ka Raja (1932), Amrit Manwould be more pleased if the costumes than (1934), Chandidas (1934), Vidyapati is against the tendency of the commercial were Indian.

(1937), President (1937), Pukar (1939), cinema to copy cheap American films. In This thinking, which gave to some of Padosi (1941), Ram Rajya (1943), Dharti a sense, therefore, it is a going back to the films in the historical section of the Ke Lal (1946), Neecha Nagar (1946), the past, to our industry's salad days FilmIndia project a certain picture post- Forty-Two (1949), Jogan (1950), Jagte when the truly Indian films like those card quality, proved, however, to be a Raho (1956) .... Prints of all these are shown in the historical section were misconception. The human interest of a available with the National Film Archive made. In this way, the historical refilm like Light of Asia was what appealed of India. But no selection can be fully trospective provided the base from which to American viewers at the retrospective, the contemporary cinema (Part III of representative or satisfy everybody. as it had 55 years earlier to London The films in the retrospective dated FilmIndia) takes off. But it is also a revolt audiences. against the dread possibility of our cinefrom 1926 to 1959. But they were "dated" The touches of universality in several also in another sense, for they established ma's "captive" audience-which includes of the films shown delighted, intrigued, that compared to America, India is still the unlettered, the immature, the utterly forever "captibewildered and e:.cited American view- painfully lacking in equipment, re- impressionable-being ers. They were moved by the abiding sources-and opportunities. The oppor- vated" by the cheap commercialism of a ingredients of drama in the theme of tunities available to filmmakers in the certain type of Hindi film. Whereas in Devdas, the ambiguity of the human United States, old and young, are hardly America one must be "cinemate" as well predicament depicted in Duniya Na so to their counterparts in India. Can as "literate" to be considered liberally Mane, the change in the nature of the one, for instance, imagine a cartoonist in educated today, in India our audiences social problem film as evidenced by India drawing the sort of cartoon that are not even fully literate. We have a long Achhut Kanya, followed by Sujata, the appeared in The New Yorker showing a way to go.

But the important thing is that with concept in Mother India that the Indian long-haired son at the breakfast table mother is not just the mother of her asking his father: "Daddy, could I have the FilmIndia project the door to the American market that was closed has at family, but of the whole community, the $20,000 to' make a film?" Seriously, vivid introduction again of the great though, the lad in the cartoon was asking last been opened. The signal contribumotherhood image (as propounded by for too much. He could make a short film tion of FilmIndia's historical retrospecErich Neumann) in the ambitious Meghe today if his daddy were to loan him just tive is that it has helped to project Indian Dhaka Tara, the cruelty of modern eco- $25, and he could purchase a workable 16- cinema to Americans and aroused Amer- , D nomic forces highlighted in Do Bigha mm camera for only $40. All of which is ican curiosity.

Zamin, the contention that the hypocrisy 'beyond our imagining in India with of the older generation was responsible equipment that is often outdated and raw for the amorality of the young in stock that is inferior and insufficient. It A waara, ... More basically" theAmerican would appear that the United States is reactions were a mixture of surprise and rapidly approaching the era predicted by appreciation: surprise that India had Jean Cocteau when the materials to make started making films at about the same films would be as' inexpensive as paper time as America and that now India and pencil! makes more films than any other country; Above all, the historical retrospecand appreciation that even in those green tive's significance lay in the fact that in years Indian filmmakers used film as a the social consciousness of the films vehicle of social protest against evils like shown, in the penetrating glimpses of the

V. Shantaram (left) in his film, Dr. Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani.

Raj Kapoor and Na[gis in Raj Kapoor's film, Awaara.

increasing incomes of food producers, who, paradoxically, are ,ministerial meeting in 1982 could make to addressing trade the ones most affected by hunger. problems of developing countries, including barriers to trade • Food aid should be seen as a temporary tool in emergency in agriculture and obstacles to the further processing of situations. It should not be used as a permanent replacement their raw material exports. for the necessary development of the required food production - '. A number of participants referred to the importance of in developing countries themselves. industrialization of developing countries and the contribution • The rate of population growth in some countries leads to which increased trade could make to this objective. Restructurincreases in food demand that are difficult to meet. The ing of developed country industries was identified as being experience of a certain number of countries has shown that relevant to this objective, as well as a positive result from the development of a population policy aids in solving some of the renegotiation of the multifiber arrangement. most acute aspects of the food problem.

• The need to help developing countries improve their • The working of international agricultural and food orga- infrastructures, including transportation and storage facilities, nizations operating within the framework of the United Nations was also raised, and a proposal for mobilizing resources to this need to be reviewed in order to avoid duplication of work, and to end was presented. improve their general efficiency.

• A long-term program geared to the eradication of hunger Energy by the year 2000 should be prepared, including elements of both • It was recognized that energy is one of the key problem internal effort and international cooperation. areas of the 1980s that must be tackled seriously and urgently.

• A number of steps could be taken to improve the The problem was characterized more as a global one than as effectiveness of food security mechanisms. Among these are the purely a NOIth-South issue. negotiation of a new international grains agreement; coordina• In order to ensure an orderly transition from the era of tion of national food reserves; expansion of the international hydrocarbons to the era of diversified energy sources, the emergency food reserve, increasing the predictability and proposal for a world energy plan as a framework providing an continuity of contributions to it. overall approach covering this complex process was recalled and • Task forces could be sent from developed to developing interest expressed in it. countries, in order to assist the latter in developing and • The potential contribution of regional energy cooperation implementing agricultural programs and effectively disseminat- schemes was also pointed out in the discussion. ing high-productivity agricultural techniques.

• It was also recognized that energy conservation must be • International trade conditions also exert a considerable pursued by major oil-consuming countries. Development of influence on the agricultural and food situation of developing new and renewable sources of energy also required emphasis.

• Emphasized in the discussion was the serious problem countries. Trade barriers raised against agricultural products hinder the growth of agricultural activity and the achievement developing countries face in meeting their large energy import bills, which for many represent a good part of their limited of food security objectives.

• The recent setting up of a "Food Facility" within the foreign exchange earnings.

• The need for increased energy investment, from both compensatory financing scheme in the International Monetary Fund constitutes an important step. In the future, however, it private and official sources, in developing countries was would be necessary for the resources allocated and the terms of stressed. Support was expressed by many participants for access to those resources to be more compatible with the needs expanded energy lending in developing countries by the World Bank and, in this respect, the establishment of an energy of food-importing developing countries. affiliate was advocated.

• The International Fund for Agricultural Development • Some participants suggested the need for better exchange of (IF AD) requires prompt replenishment of its resources so that information between energy producing and consuming counit may continue its operations without interruption. tries in order to facilitate long-term energy planning.

Commodities, Trade and Industrialization Monetary and Financial Issues • Noting the slow progress in implementing the UNCTAD • Participants reviewed the financial difficulties being experi(lJnited Nat~ons Conference on Trade and Development) integrated program for commodities, particularly in the nego- enced by developing countries with regard to their balance of tiationof new commodity agreements, participants agreed on the payment deficits, their debt service burden and their developneed to complete procedures for bringing the common fund ment financing needs.

• They discussed conditions of access by developing countries into operation. Because earnings from commodity exports are of fundamental importance to the economic growth and to the various sources of financing and the role of the relevant stability of developing countries, a range of possible approaches multilateral institutions, in particular the International Monewas suggested, including more intensive efforts to negotiate tary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, in the light of the current effective international agreements to 'stabilize commodity economic and financial problems facing developing countries.

• Points raised by some participants in the discussion included prices, and other measures aimed at stabilizing developing the impact of high interest rates, the creation and distribution of country earnings from commodity exports.

• The need. to improve the Generalized System of Prefer- liquidity and role of the SDR (Special Drawing Rights) as a ences for developing countries was also recognized, as well as main reserve asset and in financing development, IMF the need for continued efforts on the part of governments to conditionality, the decisionmaking process in the international financial institutions, access to capital markets and the respecresist protectionist pressures.

• Several participants noted the contribution which the tive role of private and official sources of external capital in D proposed GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) development financing.

Opera on Mahatma Gandhi Satyagraha, Philip Glass' opera on Mahatma Gandhi's formative years in South Africa, has won critical acclaim in the United States and Europe. Mainly a choral work sung entirely in Sanskrit, its libretto is drawn from the Bhagwad Gita.

A color picture story on the spectacular photographs sent by Voyager 2 after its four-year journey to Saturn.

Measuring Nuclear Risks An interview with Dr. Norman Rasmussen, author of the 'U.S. Atomic Energy Commission's study on the safety of nuclear reactors. Dr. Rasmussen compares the risks associated with the operation of reactors to those of other energy sources.

Nuclear power, he concludes, is the least risk)!.

Contemporary American Poetry An Indian professor of literature makes a candid appraisal of contemporary American poets.

Critical of the "naked," completely subjective confessional poetry, he welcomes the trend of "alternative poetry" written by poets who share a sense of responsibility and community.

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Chinato'Wn Kaleidoscope Said to be the largest Chinese settlement outside Asia, Chinatown, San Francisco, presents a fascinating kaleidoscopic view of tQe life and culture of the Chinese-American. It projects both the original immigrants' nostalgia for a remembered culture and the American influence on the lifestyle of the younger generation.

Such Chinatowns exist in several American cities and can be traced back to the early years of this century. They were started both as a home away from home and las a haven from the then-practiced discrimination.

Here Chinese immigrants could live in the comfort and security of a familiar ethos, here they could re-create-without eyebrows being raised-the environment they were used to.

Over the years, however, many ChineseAmericans have moved out of the Chinatowns and into more cosmopolitan areas. Only half of San Francisco's Chinese-Americans, for example, live in Chinatown. But the Chinaboth to towns continue to flourish-catering the Chinese and to exotica-searching tourists.

Two of San Francisco's most popular tours for visitors are ''Chinatown by Night" and "Chinatown by Day." By day or night, Chinatown is fascinating.

At one time much of it was a slumlike ghetto of overcrowded tenements. Today it mirrors, among other things, the success of the Chinese-Americans, whose stereotype image has changed from that 'of the laundryman to a scientist, thanks to computer wizard An Wang and Nobel Prize winners like T.D. Lee, C.N. Yang and Samuel Ting. But with progress has come a strong desire not to close the doors of the past so tight as to forget their cultural heritage. The Chinatowns keep that door open for their residents and for the outsider they offer a window to China.

Parts of Chinatown, San Francisco, seem to be right out of Canton--..,signs in Chinese hang outside buildings that are marked by pagoda tops and spindly balconies. But the American influence is there, symbolized by Chinese-American children swinging carefree in the shadows of new buildings that tower over the old; by the pagoda like structure set against a skyscraper and by the contrasting faces and lifestyles of two generations of Chinese-Americans.