March 1985

The National Aquarium of Baltimore, Maryland, offers visitors a spectacle of light, color, architecture-and more than 5,000 specimens of some 600 species of fishes, invertebrates, reptiles, amphibians, birds and mammals.

Clockwise from above: The seven-story building culminates on the top floor with an inspired rain forest inside two triangular peaks of glass which, from the outside, look like two sailing ships; a poisonous sea anemone-the clownfish swimming nearby is immune to it; children learn about the starfish; Cecilia, a female harbor seal from the Atlantic Ocean; visitors see the Atlantic Ocean coral reef displayed in the' 1.2million-liter underwater tank.

SPAN 2 American Arts, Inc.

by Alvin H. Reiss

6 Huckleberry Finn, Alive at 100

by Norman Mailer

8 Reading Between the Lions

by Charles Monaghan

12 The Sporting Spirit

by Jaiboy Joseph

15 On the Lighter Side

16 "A Second American Revolution"

by President Ronald Reagan

20 Giving Workers a Voice

by William Serrin

22 Jobs for the Future

26 In Quest of Indian Art Shanta Serbjeet Singh Interviews Henry Leo Schoebel

30 Discovering the Presidency

by George E. Reedy

32 The Kindest Cuts

by Mike Edelhart

34 Focus On ...

37 Jesse Honey, Mountain Guide A short story by Mark Helprin

43 The Robots Are Coming

by Walter Roesslng

44 Wadhwanj's Merlin

by John A. Byrne

48 Some Shapes!

by Jonathan Schiefer

Managing Editor: Himadri Dhanda. Assistant Managing Editor: Krishan Gabrani. Senior Editor: Aruna Dasgupta. Copy Editor: Nirmal Sharma. Editorial Assistant: Rocque Fernandes. Photo Editor: Avinash Pasricha. Art Director: Nand Katyal. Associate Ar~ Director: Kanti Roy. Assistant Art Director: Bimanesh Roy Choudhury. Chief of Production: Awtar S. Marwaha. Circulation Manager: Y.P. Pandhi.

Photographic Service: USIS Photographic Services Unit.

Photographs: Front cover-James Sugar/Black Star. Inside front cover-Sidney Tabak. I-Avinash Pasricha. 2-5-courtesy Philip Morris Inc., New York City. 8-Peter Aaron Esto. 9-11-Paul Conklin. 12-l4-courtesy Dr. P.M. Joseph. 22-Pix # I-Stock Intermedics Inc.; remaining pix by James Boston; # 2-courtesy Sugar/Black Star. 26-27-courtesy Henry Schoebel except 27 bottom by Avinash Pasricha. 31-Avinash Pasricha. 32-Dan McCoy/Rainbow. 34 top-courtesy Press Information Bureau, GOL 35, 36 top-R.K. Sharma. 42-Morris Helprin. 43-Carol Hightower. 44 top-copyright Storage Technology Corp.; bottom-Lynn Johnson/Black Star. 46-47Dan McCoy/Rainbow. Inside back cover and back cover-Morton C. Bradley Jr.

Published by the United States Information Service, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government. Printed by Raj Kumar Wadhwa at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana.

The following is a statement of ownership and other particulars about SPAN magazine as required under Section 19D(b) of the Press & Registration of Books Act, 1867. and under Rule 8 of the Registration of Newspaper (Central) Rules, 1956.

United

States

24 Kasturba New

2. Periodicity of Publication 3. Printer's Name Nationality

Address

Delhi

Service,

Marg,

110001

Monthly Raj

Kumar

Wadhwa

Indian

Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridahad,

4. Publisher's Name Nationality Address 5. Editor's Name Nationality Address

Information Gandhi

James

Haryana

A. McGinley

American 24 KaslUrba Mal

Gandhi

Marg,

New

Delhi

lJ0001

Gandhi

Marg,

New

Delhi

J 10001

Oettinger

American 24 Kamaba

6. Names and addresses of individuals who own the newspaper and partners or shareholders holding more than one percent of the total capital.

1, James A. McGinley, hereby declare that. the particulars given above are true to the best of my knowledge and belief.

(Signed) James A. McGinley Signature

of Publisher

Front cover: Among. the areas which will see an increase in jobs in the next decade, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, are real estate and housing, industrial quality control, geriatrics services and fiber optics. See also pages 22-23.

Back cover: Composite of Three Star Forms, an example of the multicolored art that Morton Bradley creates out of the precise world of mathematics. See page 48.

Two of the articles in this month's issue complement each other in an interesting way.

On page 30 George Reedy, who is an unusual blend of journalist, scholar and politician, discusses the growth of u.s. Presidential power in recent years. On page 16 President Ronald Reagan reports to Congress on the state of the Union, which is an example of one of the tools of leadership available to an American President.

Delivering an annual State of the Union message to Congress is one of the few specific duties imposed upon a President by the u.S. Constitation. For more than a century between 1801 and 1913 Presidents simply sent their State of the Union messages to be read to Congress by a clerk, instead of presenting it in person.

President Theodore Roosevelt referred to the Presidency as a first-rate pulpit, and he was satisfied to deliver his preachments in print through newspapers and magazines. Later Presidents saw in radio and television an opportunity to outline their programs directly to the nation as a whole, and to seek the support of individual voters in bringing pressure to bear on Congress to translate these programs into law.

Reedy notes that the Founding Fathers who drafted the Constitution were reluctant to assign many powers to the President, having recently freed themselves from what they considered the overweening attitude of the British King. Reedy has been in a unique position to assess the shifting balance of power between the legislative and executive branches of the United States--the Congress and the Presidency. He began his career as a newspaperman, like his father and grandfather. When covering the Senate, he caught the eye of a politician on the rise, Lyndon B. Johnson, who was soon to become Senate Majority Leader and later President of the United States. Reedy served as a Senate assistant to LBJ and as his Presidential press secretary in 1964-65. He observed first-hand the shifting influence of a President who, after having won a landslide election victory in 1964, lost public support for his policies to such an extent that four years later he decided not to seek another term.

Reedy, who is now Nieman Professor of Journalism at Marquette University in Wisconsin, explained the difficulties that reporters will always encounter in dealing with politicians in a recent speech to journalists and students during his third visit to India.

'What is really happening is that Presidents and journalists literally see different worlds," he said. "Presidents are politicians and politicians are basically warr.iors. What they see is a world composed of people who want to help them and people who want to frustrate them. They do not make an exception for journalists.

What I discovered in my years as spokesman for a political leader is that all of them regard the press as a battle stage between contending politicians. The concept that the story was written just because it happened, is beyond their comprehension. Politicians naturally feel that their goals are right, that there is a battle between good and evil and that people--including journalists--are either for them or against them."

Reedy has some sympathy for the fact that "a President is the symbol of the nation as long as he is in the White House. Therefore, journalistic coverage does not lapse for one moment. In addition the coverage goes to his personal life--and the personal lives of his family." ' On occasions such as the State of the Union message, which is nationally telecast on all three major u.S. networks during prime evening time, the President is able to sp~ak directly to citizens without his thoughts being filtered through reporters. Modern communication technology has unquestionably increased the powers of the President as it has changed dramatically the way journalists practice their trade. In his classes at Marquette, Reedy emphasizes the need for journalists to become familiar with the modern tools of their trade and not fight them: "I have a horror of turning out obsolete students-young fogies." Although there are a diminished number of daily newspapers in the United States, he says, broadcasting and cable news services assure that there will be a continuing diversity of opinion expressed throughout the country. This, he says, has become part of the checks and balances of the American system.

--J.A.M.

merican Arts, Inc.

More and more America~ corporations are discovering that supporting the nation's arts is not only a social obligation but also good business.

If through some improbable circumstance corporate America felt inclined to produce its own arts festival, it could feature, among others, a Xerox Corporation affiliate-artist pianist, an Atlantic Richfield residency ensemble, and· a Bell System American orchestra on tour led by an Exxon! Arts Endowment conductor. Art exhibitions might be presented in New York City at a Whitney Museum of American Art branch at Philip Morris offices and the American Craft Museum NO.1 at International Paper Company headquarters. Without exhausting the possibilities, the festival might win funding from the American Express cause-related marketing program.

-No, conglomerates haven't discovered a promising new area of diversification. Nor is there any danger of IBM buying New York's Metropolitan Opera. What is probable, however, is that business involvement in the arts will become increasingly pragmatic in coming years as American corporations recognize that an identification with cultural organizations can help them realize key marketing and sales objectives, involve them with audiences they wish to reach, and give them the kind of public image that is critical to their success.

While American business has been increasingly supportive of the arts, few business executives, until recently, conceded any motive for their assistance other than corporate social responsibility or a slightly less altruistic need to better serve their communities and their employees. One of the first corporate executives to openly acknowledge the specific and practical benefits that his company realized through its arts support was Paul H. Elicker, president and board chairman of SCM Corporation, a diversified conglomerate with close to $2,000 million in annual sales. Elicker has often said, "SCM isn't exactly a household word, and we sponsor museum exhibitions for the publicity value because we seek to become better known." He also has contended that for his company to win the kind of recognition it does by spending $200,000 a year Abridged

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Meet the Founding Mothers.

One American company committed to promote the arts is Philip Morris, makers of Marlboro cigarettes and Miller beer. Over the years, it has sponsored some of the country's most ambitious art exhibitions as well asfilming them so that many more people can see them in theaters, on TV, and in schools and colleges.

Shown here are some of the company's advertisements for their sponsored exhibitions that were also filmed. Left: This small part (see enlargement above) from the exhibition "Remember the Ladies" shows the art and craft of, and about, the Revolutionary women born between 1750 and 1815. Center: A section of the show "Two Centuries of Black American Art." Far left: This ad giV!s a glimpse of Hopper's works included in the exhibition "Edward"Hopper: the Art and the Artist."

Center, and the on museum sponsorship, as it now does, it would have to spend tion's $1 'million to Wortham Theater Atlantic Richfield Foundation's $500,000 to the Dallas (Texas) $1 million a year for five years on advertising.

Symphony, and some new and interesting funding concepts.

Elicker's candor is now being echoed by other corporate leaders, although sometimes in more muted tones. "There is a To help promote its new Dallas-to-London route, American higher percentage of the kind of people we want to reach in Airlines gave the Dallas Symphony $5 for each passenger who the arts," contends Edward Block, vice-president of American flew that route over a specified six-month period. To help push Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T), referring to his company's its frequent-flier program, American Airlines gave the Fort five-year, $12-million symphony-tour support project. "You Worth Symphony $3 for each route segment flown by Fort think in terms of what it costs you to reach whatever kind of Worth members of the program. American Express, through its person you're trying to reach, and clearly our support of cause-related marketing program, has tied charge-card sales to orchestras is a very attractive business proposition." donations to cultural organizations, pumping $1.5 million into The fact that business is seeking something tangible from its the arts economy in the process. The program has generated an involvement with the arts might, on the surface, seem crass or additional $3 million in arts-advertising support. even exploitative, but in reality it may be a healthy omen.

Perhaps the most openly and aggressively pragmatic proImplicit in the corporate viewpoint is the recognition that a gram is the concept initiated by the northern sales division of quality cultural program in itself and without change, is a Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and Smith with the help of commodity of great value. The arts represent excellence, and a a commercial promotion and marketing firm, Sports Etcetera. reflection of that excellence rubs off on those businesses that Through the program, several cultural organizations were help arts groups do what they want to do-mount exhibitions, offered and have accepted sponsorship packages involving the purchase of cultural services and goods. Packages, which bear the develop new works and perform in public.

The caveat, of course, is in the words in itself and without Merrill Lynch name identification, are worth anywhere from change, for whenever business tries to interfere in the artistic $5,000 to as much as $50,000 and include such benefits as series' process-and it has happened from time to time in recent sponsorship-Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) Symphony's greatyears-it has not only distorted the partnership but hurt both performers series is now known as the Merrill Lynch greatperformers series-the purchase of season tickets, program itself and the arts group in the process.

One of the key elements helping to make this pragmatic advertising, local publicity and special events. Because arts partnership work is the fact that a growing number of business participants have not had to alter their programming or deviate people such as Ed Block of AT&T and George Weissman of from their artistic concepts, they have not felt exploited but Philip Morris are individual patrons of the arts themselves. instead have thought of themselves as partners in a good Additionally, within many corporations nowadays the execu- business relationship. tives involved in corporate arts funding are people who have Nevertheless, as the funding crunch grows in the arts, there worked in and with arts groups. is some concern that money (especially with a wealthy angel The new attitude of the arts toward business is perhaps waiting in the wings) or the lack of money could influence typified by Affiliate Artists, which has been suggesting to artistic direction. "We're going to have to concentrate on the corporations for years that they tie their names into the titles of kind of show that can easily be funded," said Philippe de sponsored six-week artist residencies. "My view of my job is Montebello, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's director, in a New York Times interview. "And it will require great discipline that I'm a salesperson," says Ann Dunbar, the organization's vice-president for residency sponsorship. "I'm selling residen- and deftness to avoid the pitfalls of mounting only the popular exhibitions, neglecting those of scholarly importance." cies to corporations, and that's a service product."

The future suggests new and different kinds of arts-business James McIntyre, Carnegie Hall's director of corporate relationships, including partnerships in the commercial arena. funding and another pragmatist on the trail of corporate dollars, has learned that companies often are interested in using Already nonprofit arts groups are packaging productions for arts support to boost their prestige among clients. Early in 1983 commercial and cable television, opening shops for arts-related Banker's Trust in New York City, which was underwriting a items in department stores, and becoming involved in major Houston Symphony performance, flew a group bf key custom- real-estate enterprises. While continuing to explore these areas ers up from Houston, Texas, to attend the Carnegie Hall of financial potential, however, arts leaders appear to have performance. On another recent occasion, the United States been careful to remember that their first concern is the Trust Company, seeking an elegant way to introduce its clients development of their artistic product.

Through programs such as Business Volunteers for the Arts, to its new midtown New York City office in a remodeled which operates in six major American cities and is expanding, landmark brownstone, asked the management of nearby hundreds of younger executives, the corporate decision makers Carnegie Hall to come up with a concert it could sponsor. On of the future, have been getting to know, understand and the selected night, the company introduced clients to the new offices at an elegant cocktail reception and then bused them respect the needs of cultural groups by volunteering hours of over to Carnegie Hall for a concert by a chamber ensemble, the their time to them.

Perhaps the best safeguard to a future arts-business relaAcademy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields.

As the economic crisis in the arts continues, due both to tionship is inherent in the arts process itself, which is exploradiminished government funding and rising costs, the siege of tory, demanding, visionary and insistent upon excellence. corporate treasures seems likely to intensify. Both Exxon and Echoing other corporate arts supports, Sandra Ruch, the Philip Morris report receiving an estimated 1,300 to 1,500 manager of Mobil's' cultural promotion department; says, "We requests for aid each year, up significantly from previous years, .care about quality." And quality, most of all, is what the arts are really about.

0 and many are solid, on-target proposals that match corporate criteria and concerns with the senders' programming and About the Author: Alvin H. Reiss is editor of Arts Management and organizational needs. The result has been larger grants than director of the graduate arts-management program at Adelphi University ever before, including such recent awards as General Corpora- in New York City.

Top: Director Julius Potocsny on location shooting of Grand Central Terminal: City Within the City for Philip Morris. Right: Sculptor Alexander Liberman in the film A Lifetime Burning. Above: A still from the Philip Morris movie Bearden Plays Bearden shows a boa constrictor around the Conjure Woman's neck. Above, center: "Friendship Flag," an anonymous quilt made in 1899, hangs at the Philip Morris Art Collection in World Headquarters, New York. Above, far right: Made of pine, tobacco and rope, "Harvest Home" by John Okulick was commissioned by Philip Morris.

Huckleberry Finn,Alive at100 When Norman Mailer read Huckleberry Finn as an ii-year-old, he was disappointed. Reading Mark Twain's novel again, a hundred years after it was first published, he is "alternately delighted, surprised, annoyed, competitive, critical and finally excited."

Is there a sweeter tonic for the doldrums than old reviews of great novels?

In 19th-century Russia, Anna Karenina was received with the following: "Vronsky's passion for his horse runs parallel to his passion for Anna." ... "Sentimental rubbish." ... "Show me one page," says The Odessa Courier, "that contains an idea."

Moby-Dick was incinerated: "Graphic descriptions of a dreariness such as we do not remember to have met with before In marine literature." ... "Sheer moonstruck lunacy." ...

"Sad stuff. Mr. Melville's Quakers are wretched dolts and drivellers and his mad captain is a monstrous bore."

By this measure, Huckleberry Finn (published a hundred years ago in New York on February 18, 1885) gets off lightly.

The Springfield Republican judged it to be no worse than "a gross trifling with every fine feeling .... Mr. Clemens has no reliable sense of propriety," and the public library in Concord,Massachusetts, was confident enough to ban it: "The veriest trash." The Boston Transcript reported that "other members of the Library Committee characterize the work as rough, coarse and inelegant, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people."

All the same, the novel was not too unpleasantly regarded.

There were no large critical hurrahs but the reviews were, on the whole, friendly. A good tale, went the consensus. There was no sense that a great American novel had landed on the literary world of 1885. The critical climate could hardly anticipate T.S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway's encomiums 50 years later. In the preface to an English edition, Eliot would speak of "a masterpiece .... Twain's genius is com-

pletely realized," and Hemingway went further. In Green Hills of Africa, after disposing of Emerson, Hawthorne and Thoreau, and paying off Henry James and Stephen Crane with a friendly nod, he proceeded to declare, "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn .... It's the best bOOk we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before.

There has been nothing as good since."

Hemingway, with his nonpareil gift for nosing out the perfect vin du pays for an ineluctable afternoon, was nonetheless more like other novelists in one dire respect: he was never at a loss to advance himself with his literary judgments.

Assessing the writing of others, he used the working author's rule of thumb: If I give this book a good mark, does it help appreciation of my work? Obviously, Huckleberry Finn has passed the test.

A suspicion immediately arises. Mark Twain is doing the kind of -writing only Hemingway can do better. Evidently, we must take a look. May I say it helps to have read Huckleberry Finn so long ago that it feels brand-new on picking it up again. Perhaps I was 11 when I saw it last, maybe 13, but now I only remember that I came to it after Tom Sawyer and was disappointed.

I couldn't really follow The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The character of Tom Sawyer whom I had liked so much in the first book was altered, and did not seem nice any more.

Huckleberry Finn was altogether beyond me. Later, I recollect being surprised by the high regard nearly everyone who taught American literature lavished upon the text, but that didn't bring me back to it. Obviously, I was waiting for an assignment from The New York Times.

Let me offer assurances. It may have been worth the wait. I suppose I am the lO-millionth reader to say that Huckleberry Finn is an extraordinary work.

Indeed, for all I know, it is a great novel.

Flawed, quirky, uneven, not above taking cheap shots and cashing far too many checks (it is rarely above milking its humor)-all the same, what a book we have here! I had the most curious sense of

excitement. After a while, I understood my peculiar frame of attention. The book was so up-to-date! I was not reading a classic author so much as looking at a new work sent to me in galleys by a publisher. It was as if it had arrived with one of those rare letters which says, "We won't make this claim often but do think we have an extraordinary first novel to send out." So it was like reading From Here to Eternity in galleys, back in 1950, or Lie Down in Darkness, Catch-22, or The WorldAccording to Garp (which reads like a fabulous first novel) .. You kept being alternately delighted, surprised, annoyed, competitive, critical and finally excited. A new writer had moved onto the block. He could be a potential friend or enemy but he most certainly was talented.

That was how it felt to read Huckleberry Finn a second time. I kept resisting the context until I finally surrendered.

One always does surrender sooner or later to a book with a strong magnetic field. I felt as if I held the work of a young writer about 30 or 35, a prodigiously talented fellow from the Midwest, from Missouri probably, who had had the audacity to write a historical novel about the Mississippi as it might have been a century and a half ago, and this young writer had managed to give us a circus of fictional virtuosities.

In nearly every chapter new and remarkable characters bounded out from the printed page as if it were a tarmac on which they could perform their leaps. The author's confidence seemed so complete that he could deal with every kind of man or woman God ever gave to the middle of America.

Jailhouse drunks like Huck Finn's father take their bow, full of the raunchy violence that even gets into the' smell of clothing.

Gentlemen and river rats, young, attractive girls full of grit and "sand," and strong old ladies with aphorisms clicking like knitting needles, fools and confidence men-what a cornucopia of rabble and gentry inhabit the author's river banks.

It would be superb stuff if only the writer did not keep giving away the fact that he was a modern young American working in 1984. His anachronisms were

not so much in the historical facts-those seemed accurate enoughbut the point of view was too contemporary.

The scenes might succeed-say it again, this young writer was talented!-but he kept betraying his literary influences. The author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn had obviously been taught a lot by such major writers as Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos and John Steinbeck; he had certainly lifted from Faulkner and the mad tone Faulkner could achieve when writing about maniacal men feuding in deep swamps; he had also absorbed much of what Vonnegut and Heller could teach about the resilience of irony. If he had a surer feel for the picaresque than Saul Bellow in Augie March, still he felt derIvative of that work. In places one could swear he had memorized The Catcher in the Rye, and he probably dipped into Deliverance and Why Are We in Vietnam? He might even have studied the mannerisms of movie stars. You could feel traces of John Wayne, Victor McLaglen and Burt Reynolds in his pages. The author had doubtless digested many a Hollywood comedy on smalltown life. His instinct for life in hamlets on the Mississippi before the Civil War was as sharp as it was farcical, and couldn't be more commercial.

No matter. With talent as large as this, one could forgive the obvious eye for success. Many a large talent has to go through large borrowings in order to find his own style, and a lust for popular

obviously fearful that his tone is getting too near, is careful to sprinkle his text with "a-clutterings" and "warn'ts" and "anywheres" and "t'others." But we have read Hemingway-and so we see¡ through it-we know we are reading pure Hemingway disguised: "We cut young cottonwoods and willows, and hid the raft with them. Then we set out the lines. Next we slid into the river and had a swim ... then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee-deep and watched the daylight come. Not a sound anywheres ... the first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line-that was the woods on t'other side; success while dangerous to serious writyou couldn't make nothing else out; then ing is not necessarily fatal. Yes, one could a pale place in the sky; then more paleness spreading around; then the river accept the pilferings from other writers, softened up away off, and warn't black given the scope of this work, the brilanymore ... by and by you could see a liance of the concept-to catch rural streak on the water which you know by America by a trip on a raft down a great river! One could even marvel uneasily at ..the look of the streak that there's a snag the depth of the instinct for fiction in. the there in a swift current which breaks on it author. With the boy Huckleberry Finn, and makes that streak look that way; and this new novelist had managed to give us you see the mist curl up off of the water a character of no comfortable, measurand the east reddens up and the river." able dimension. It is easy for characters Up to now I have conveyed, I expect, in modern novels to seem more vivid than the pleasure of reading this book today. figures in the classics but, even so, It is the finest compliment I can offer. We Huckleberry use an unspoken standard of relative Finn appeared to be more judgment on picking up a classic. Secretalive than Don Quixote and Julian Sorel, ly, we expect less reward from it than as naturally near to his own mind as we from a good contemporary novel. The are to ours. But how often does a hero who is so absolutely natural on the page average intelligent modern reader would also succeed in acquiring convincing morprobably, under torture, admit that Heartal stature as his adventures burn was more fun to read, minute for develop?

It is to be repeated. In the attractive minute, than Madame Savary, and maybe one even learned more. That is not grip of this talent, one is ready to forgive to say that the first will be superior to the. the author of Huckleberry Finn for every second a hundred years from now but that influence he has so promiscuously absorbed. He has made such fertile use of a classic novel is like a fine horse carrying his borrowings. One could even cheer his an exorbitant impost. Classics suffer by appearance on our jaded literary scene if their distance from our day-to-day gossip. not for the single transgression that goes The mark of how good Huckleberry Finn too far. These are passages that do more has to be is that one can compare it to a than borrow an author's style-they copy number of our best modern American it! Influence is mental, but theft is physinovels and it stands up page for page, cal. Who can declare to a certainty that a awkward here, sensational therelarge part of the prose in Huckleberry absolutely the equal of one of those rare Finn is not lifted diFectly from Hemingincredible first novels that come along once or twice in a decade. So I have way? We know that we are not reading Hemingway only because the author, (Text continued on page 19)

Patience and Fortitude guard the entrance to the New York Public Library. The two regal lions, favorites with New Yorkers, were sculpted by Edward Clark Potter.

much as any place in the city, the New York Public Library symbolizes New York. It is akeycultural ~ resource, known to generations of students and readers, and its central location at Fifth A venue and 42nd Street makes it a perfect place for friends and lovers to meet. From there, you can strike out easily for the East Side, take a stroll to the Theater District or board a bus to the heart of Greenwich Village. What is less appreciated is that the building itself, a National Historical Landmark, is eminently worth a visit.

The library's amazing collection of books and other research material is only part of the attraction. Its architecture is one of the country's leading examples of the Beaux Arts style, much favored in public bl,Jildingsconstructed at the turn of the century. A fact even less known is that the library is a repository of artincluding some masterpieces of American painting-that would be the envy of many a museum. In addition, there are always lively and provocative exhibitions plucked from the library's own resources and displayed in rooms such as the recently reopened Gottesman Hall that are marvels of design themselves. And during the past year or two, the library, both inside and out, has been restored and buffed to a sparkle.

The New York Public Library-also known as the Central Research Librarywas opened to the public on May 24, 1911, after nine years of construction.

The land on which it was built had been the site of the Croton Reservoir, from which water (originating in upstate New York) was piped to other parts of the city. The building, which cost just over $9

million, was paid for by New York City.

The books that went into the new library were from two collections previously housed elsewhere in the city: the Astor Library and the Lenox Library.

Another important contribution to the birth of the institution was $2.25 million donated by the Tilden Trust, set up in the will of Samuel J. Tilden, a New Yorker who was the Democratic candidate for President in 1876. John Jacob Astor, James Lenox and Tilden are commemorated in granite above the entrance to the library.

The architects of the building, John M. Carrere and Thomas Hastings, were both graduates of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. This influential school of architecture gave its name to the Beaux Arts style, also called the High Classical by some critics. The style involves complete symmetry and heavy decoration. The Louvre in Paris was the ideal building of the Beaux Arts theorists. The New York Public Library is 120 meters-two city blocks-long and 52 meters deep. Two inner courtyards provide light for reading rooms. A total of 15,000 cubic meters of marble were used in the building, brought by horsecart from Vermont and by boat from Greece, Italy, France and Belgium. Books are housed on eight levels at the rear of the building in what have grown to 140 kilometers of stacks.

The New York Public Library system as it exists today aCtually has two parts. It operates 82 branch libraries in Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island. But it is probably¡ better known-especially among scholars and visitors to the cityfor its second responsibility, the research libraries, of which the Fifth Avenue

building is the centerpiece. Others include the Library and Museum of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem and the Annex on West 43rd Street, near the Hudson River, which houses an extensive patent division and the library's famed newspaper collection.

It is the research libraries-with 6 million books, 12 million manuscripts and 2.8 million pictures, among other itemsthat rank the New York Public Library as one of the five such great institutions in the world, along with the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., the Library of the British Museum in London, the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris and the Lenin Library in Moscow.

Tales of scholarly feats accomplished in the Central Library abound. One interesting story concerns the first president of Pan American Airways, Juan Trippe. He wished to have his planes fly across the Pacific and needed a refueling stop. Consulting the logs of old clipper ships at the library, Trippe found a reference to a dot of land called Wake Island. It became Pan Am's refueling stop and, later, the site of a famed World War II battle.

While government sources pay nearly' all the expenses of the 82 branch libraries, they provide only a bit less than half of the $26-million budget of the research libraries. In the past, substantial individual benefactions were the main source of revenues. In 1923, for instance, John D. Rockefeller, Edward S. Harkness of Standard Oil and transit mogul William C. Whitney gave $6 million. But in the 1970s, the library's deficits began to mount, and the institution could not look

to New York City, which was struggling with its own budget problems, for help.

There was a pinched air in the research libraries, and the Fifth Avenue branches were closed on Thursdays to keep costs down.

To the rescue came Vartan Gregorian, former provost of the University of Pennsylvania, who was appointed president and director of the library in 1981. With the help of Brooke (Mrs. Vincent) Astor, honorary chairperson of the library's board, Gregorian once again made the library the darling of New York society.

Recent donors of $1,000 or more included Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Lily Auchincloss, John Chancellor, Virgil Thomson and Danny Kaye. A gala fundraising ball for 1,500 marked the reopening of Gottesman Hall. In addition, a successful direct-mail campaign cast a wider net for the library, bringing donations from 44,000 people. Altogether, $13.4 million was raised from private sources in 1982-83.

One enters the building from Fifth Avenue up a monumental 'staircase, which is flanked by statues of regal lions sculpted by Edward Clark Potter. The lions are favorites of New Yorkers and were nicknamed Patience and Fortitude

by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. You go into the library through a bronze door that leads into Astor Hall. Every surface of this grandiose entrance is covered with marble, even the vaulting. Sweeping staircases on either side lead to the upper floors.

Directly behind Astor Hall on the entrance level is Gottesman Hall. The room was originally designed by Carrere and Hastings as a display area for the treasures of the library. After World War II, when the library was cramped for space, the room was divided into offices. It has been restored to its former opulence (with modern exhibition lighting added) by architect Giorgio Cavaglieri. The room has four massive pillars of graystreaked Cippolino marble and walls of

The research facilities-with 6 million books, 12 million manuscripts and 2.8 million pictures -make it a haven for scholars. white Vermont marble. One special feature is a carved-wood Renaissance-style ceiling commissioned from Maurice Grieve by the architects; it is one of the few carved-wood ceilings in the United States.

The arch that joins Astor Hall and Gottesman Hall is also the center of the north-south axis of the library, a corridor known as the Great Gallery. The walls are of Pendelic marble, which is used in the Parthenon in Athens.

At the south end of the Great Gallery is the DeWitt Wallace Periodicals Room, named after the founder of the Reader's Digest. As a young man, Wallace would work in the Periodicals Room making

summaries of magazine articles, a practice that led to the founding of the Digest.

Wallace left $2 million in his will for the restoration of the room, also done by Giorgio Cavaglieri. Here are carved panels of rich wood, an elaborate plaster ceiling stained to resemble wood, and new murals by Richard Hass of historical New York publishing buildings. At the north end of the Great Gallery is the Map Division, in an architectural-though as yet unrestored-twin of the Periodicals Room.

The second floor of the library is largely devoted to office space. The third floor is the one best known to scholars and students. Ascending through spaces filled with gray-white marble, the visitor enters on the third-floor landing, or Rotunda, which is lined with dark wood, signaling the studious business taking place here.

Murals by Edward Laning, painted for the Works Project Administration in 1937, tell the story of the recorded word, and a ceiling painting depicts the story of

Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. .

West of the landing is the Catalogue Room, and beyond that is perhaps the most famous room in the library, the Main Reading Room. It is 90 meters long and 24 meters deep, with wide windows set in Romanesque arches. The room is divided by the low delivery desk, where readers pick up books they have commanded from the stacks. The comfortable chairs, sturdy tables and bronze reading lamps were all designed by Carrere and Hastings.

In addition to the Main Reading Room, there are numerous rooms scattered along the library's corridors, many especially endowed, which house a variety of literary treasures. The Map Division has 300,000 maps, 6,000 atlases and 11,000 books about geography. It's the most widely used map collection in the world. The Rare Books and Manuscript Division has, among other gems, ancient Babylonian tablets, a copy of the U.S.

Declaration of Independence in Jefferson's hand and the voluminous correspondence of Noah Webster. The Slavonic Division has materials in 12 Slavonic languages, plus Latvian and Lithuanian. The Jewish Division has 115,100 books and one of the world's largest collections of Jewish newspapers and periodicals. The Art, Prints and Photographs Division, in addition to its 2.8 million photos, has 150,000 original prints by Edouard Manet, Mary Cassatt, Kitagawa Utamaro and other artists.

Other works of art-paintings, sculpture, tapestries and prints-are displayed thro~ghout the library. One particularly significant collection is in the Berg Exhibition Room, just off the third-floor Rotunda. It includes eight Gilbert Stuarts (and a full-length portrait of George Washington painted for the first attorney general, John Jay), two paintings by John S. Copley, two by Samuel F.B. Morse and works b.y Sir Joshua Reynolds, James Peale and Augustus John.

D

Facing page: The Main Reading Room o/the Library.

Left: Researchers wanting a bit of solitude can find it many places in the sprawling premises. Left, above: In the children's room, afather reads to his son.

Above: Children's author/illustrator Renny Charlip conducts afree demonstration on making a picturebook.

¡ e'/ 8porting Spirit

One of the first Indians to qualify in Physical Education from the United States, Dr. P.M. Joseph has been closely associated with the growth of sports and fitness in India.

'P

hysical Education's main concern is not the production of champs, but the all-round development of man," observed Dr. P.M. Joseph, one of India's leading professionals in the field, on his 80th birthday recently. Relaxing at his home in Chengannur, Kerala, Joseph added, "In the old days there was a fragmented approach to physical culture with emphasis on drills and calisthenics. Instructors were often army personnel loaned to schools for weekly exercise sessions. We've come a long way since then with Physical Education now being handled by qualified people." Dr. Joseph, who retired 17 years ago, was among the early professionals.

He was one of the first Indian students to qualify in physical training from Springfield College, Massachusetts, which celebrated its centenary last October. Joseph took his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Physical Education from there in the early 1930s.

Recounts Joseph: "What I learned in the United States was a concept of physical training as an integral part of education. Play and related physical activities should be structured in such a manner as to contribute to the total development of a person. I am happy that over the years this concept has gained wide acceptance in India."

In 1965, some 34 years after he left the United States as a student, Springfield College invited him back to honor him with a doctorate in Humanities. He shared the limelight on that day with the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. who was also awarded an honorary doctorate. In conferring the doctorate, the college recognized Joseph's role in "spreading the ideals and message of Springfield in his country, and among his people."

Another great moment for Joseph came two years later when he was awarded the Padma Shri for his service to the nation "in the cause of sport, recreation and allied disciplines." As the Malayala Manorama commented, "Dr. Joseph's dedication in important departments of Physical Education literally from Kashmir to Kanyakumari makes him highly deserving of such an honour."

Joseph helped to draft the National Plan for Physical Education in 1949. The plan laid down-for the first time-concrete steps that the Central Government would take to promote and support Physical Education. The Lakshmibai National College of Physical Education at Gwalior, with its beautiful campus and modern facilities, was established as a part of this plan in 1957. As founder principal, Joseph "saw this institution grow right from the first brick .... I had Springfield very much in·mind in some aspects of the planning."

Earlier, Joseph was involved in the development of the Government Institute of Physical Education in Kandivli, Facingpage, counter-clockwise from top: Dr. P.M. Joseph today, at 80; Joseph (third from right) with classmates at afreshman camp organized by Springfield College, Massachusetts, in 1931; here he talks to a young tennis player at a coaching clinic organized by the YMCA College of Physical Education in Madras recently.

Bombay, and the YMCA College of Physical Education in Madras, both of which he headed. These institutions have turned out many instructors and coaches who have spread the philosophy of Physical Education all over the country.

During his career he has also been on technical committees relating to stadia development and physical culture (including yoga) projects, but his pet interest has always been promotion of rural recreation. He is currently preparing a compendium of games of totally Indian origin which can be introduced in villages because they do not require expensive sports equipment.

In his early years in the profession, Joseph was instrumental in introducing several Western games in many sports centers in rural and urban India. "Basketball and volleyball which are today played everywhere in India originated in the United States-basketball in Springfield and volleyball at Ludlow,. a suburb of Springfield. My colleagues and I, along with some American associates, also helped to promote swimming and boxing in India."

Joseph himself was introduced to Physical Education by an American, H.C. Buck, who has been called "the father of the Indian Olympic movement" (see SPAN August 1984). After completing his B.Sc., Joseph worked in a chemical company specializing in leather technology.

While staying at the YMCA in Madras in the late 1920s he got into the habit of playing different team games for recreation. He soon became a leader in the early-morning conditioning sessions. D.F. McLelland, the YMCA \ secretary, noticing his potential, introduced him to a fellow American, 'H.c. Buck, a physical director from Pennsylvania who had started the YMCA College of Physical Education in Madras in· 1920. With Buck's encouragement, Joseph joined his college. Soon after he completed his training he was taken on the staff of the American Mission College at Madurai on Buck's recommendation.

Here Joseph popularized ·two American sports. He reminisces, "Principal B.S. Stoffer was a professional baseball and basketball player from Kansas. A basketball court was laid at the college, and the game became an instant success. The example was soon followed by other institutions in the region. We also introduced softball which had a few devotees who came to the diamond [the softball field] every evening."

Joseph's enthusiasm and his help in laying out the track, the jumping pits and throwing circles at the college also attracted several students to athletics. Impressed by Joseph's work, Buck and Dr. J.H. Gray (who had been his other professor at Madras), both Springfield alumni, recommenQed him to their alma mater for a scholarship.

A thrilled Joseph soon received a telegram carrying an offer of a tuition grant from Springfield.

It wasn't the best time to be in America, however, Joseph recalls. "I went to the United States during the economic crisis there and the worldwide depression. I had the tuition scholarship, but meeting other costs seemed impossible. Among those who encouraged me to brave it were my elder brother, Pothan Joseph [the well-known Indian newspaper editor who was awarded a Padma Bhushan posthumously in 1973] and my eldest brother, the late George Joseph, a Middle Temple nationalist lawyer."

There were no travel grants in those days and so he decided to rough it out. "I boarded a French freighter at

Pondicherry, and as an economy measure traveled thirdclass, below the main deck. I vividly remember a group of criminals who were being taken to France from French Indo-China under the charge of a team of police guards.

They shared our table at mealtime!" Landing at Marseilles, Joseph took a train to Calais to cross over to Dover in England from where he traveled to New York by sea.

Springfield College is small compared to neighboring institutions like Yale and Harvard and yet has a stamp of distinction. Physical Education is one of the majors offered and even in Joseph's time there it was a popular choice.

Recalling his days there, Joseph says that the physical training was performance-oriented which meant it was vital to gain high ratings not only in the classroom but in outdoor activities such as games and camping. The college team, the Springfield Huskies, had a reputation in intercollegiate athletics for high quality gymnastics.

Off the field, those who impressed young Joseph were the college president, Lawrene L. Doggel, Dr. J .H. MacCurdy of the Physical Education department, Professor H.M. Burr of the Sociology department and Professor J.H. Hickox, the basketball coach who took a special interest in Joseph's welfare., His "patron saint" there was r -\ the professor of physiology, Dr. 'I Peter V. Karpovich, a Russian who had fled his country during the October Revolution. "I had a special liking for physiology which most American students disliked," says Joseph. "I stood first in the subject and so Dr. Karpovich appointed me as his assistant. This was a big break because the family income from Kerala was not adequate to share it with their boy in the United States.

"The first lesson I learnt in America," says Joseph, "was that of dignity of labor. Till I got the assistant's post I worked my way through college shoveling snow, dusting the library, From left: General K.M. Cariappa, sweeping, Dr. S. Radhakrishnan and cleaning lavatories, cutting trees Dr, Joseph at the inauguration of and painting houses at 40 cents an the Lakshmibai College of Physical hour."

Education in Gwalior in 1957.

The jobs got him money-and some memorable moments. In the summer of 1931 a "youngie" (the chief janitor), who had taken a liking to Joseph, put him in charge of the college guest rooms. One day the youngie told him that he was going to have a special guest-Dr. James A. Naismith.

Says Joseph, "I was very excited because Dr. Naismith was a legendary figure in the United States after his invention of basketball. I did up the room to the last detail and eagerly waited for him. At 3 p.m. a car came with Dr. Naismith at the wheel. I received him and took him to his room. He looked around and seemed mighty pleased.

When I delivered the luggage, he offered me $2 which I promptly declined.

"Dr. Naismith remonstrated, saying, 'We in this country pay for services and you have done me a service,' to which I replied, 'We in our country consider it an honor to serve a senior person of very great status without !

accepting'payment.' 'But young man,' he insisted, 'I want to give you some reward.' I then said, 'Sir, I'll be happier if you can give me your autograph.' Opening my little book he wrote: 'In remembrance of a service done which I appreciate.' Today the framed autograph adorns the Devangar Basketball Club at Bangalore. The club, incidentally, is the brainchild of N.C. Narappa who was my student at Gwalior and later also trained in Springfield."

How had Naismith hit on the idea of basketball?

Joseph explains: "It happened when Dr. Naismith was a football coach at Springfield College. He had a set of Huskies who had to be kept in condition during the winter months when outdoor activities were not possible. Gymnastics on stationary apparatus did not appeal to the Huskies. So he developed a ball game to be played on the gymnasium floor. But space was limited. Thrust and power were important in games like football, and here the gymnasium floor was too small. So instead of a goal on the ground-level as in hockey and football, where successful shooting involved force, he worked on the concept of agility and accuracy. The ball was to be put into a peach basket which was fixed ten feet [three meters] high on the protecting rail of the indoor running track. To prevent rough play he introduced the idea of 'no body contact.'

Every time a goal was scored by basketing the ball, someone had to climb a ladder and take the ball out. Then Dr. Naismith decided to knock off the bottom of the peach basket, so that the ball could fall down after the goal was scored." And so basketball was born. Joseph remembers telling Dr. Naismith that it was "a peach of an idea."

When Joseph returned to India in 1931 he called at his alma mater, the YMCA College of Physical Education in Madras. Buck was ill at Kodaikanal with a liver abscess.

Gray had come down from the United States to help out.

Working without a salary, Joseph helped Gray to layout the playgrounds and athletic fields. When Buck recovered and came back Joseph was taken on as a lecturer.

In 1938 he became principal of the Government College of Physical Education in Bombay. It was a new college and Joseph had to choose the site, plan the buildings, equip the college and plan out the courses.

Buck passed away in Madras in 1943. Joseph rejoined Madras College as principal in 1947. He was there till 1949. He then moved on to the Lakshmibai National College in Gwalior. It was from here that he retired in 1967.

Despite his age, Joseph is sprightly and well-preserved and continues to play an active part in the deliberations of central and state government committees and. private bodies. He cycles for six hours every morning.

In 1981, he attended the 50th reunion of the class of 1931 at Springfield. The memorable three-day golden jubilee reunion was well attended. "As expected, the classmates I met were so different from the young men they were 50 years earlier," says Joseph. "Almost one-fourth of the class had gone to the Great Beyond. But when we gathered in groups and had our 'bull sessions' we were young in spirits and no more old. We swapped stories and had a great time. Will we all meet again at the next reunion in 1986? we wondered."

0 About the Author: Jaiboy Joseph, a nephew of Dr. P.M, Joseph, is a columnist for the Financial Express and a correspondent of the National Archives of Oral History.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

Reprinted with permission frolll The Saturday Evening Post Society, a division of BFL and MS Inc.

"/ don't care what your doctor said! I'm telling you to stop relaxing or else!"

Copyright © Ross/Rothco,

©

1984.

STATE OF THE UNION

)\ Second American Revolution'

Following a hallowed democratic tradition, the American President annually gives the U.S. Congress his views on the state of the Union and presents his programs for the coming years. Below are excerpts from this year's address.

Four years ago, we began to change-forever, T hope-our assumptions about government and its place in our lives. Out of that change has come great and robust growth-in our confidence, our economy and our role in the world.

Tonight, America is stronger because of the values that we hold dear. We believe faith and freedom must be our guiding stars, for they show us truth, make us brave, give us hope and leave us wiser than we were. Our progress began not in Washington, D.C., but in the hearts of our families, communities, work places and voluntary groups which, together, are unleashing the invincible spirit of one great nation under God. Four years ago, we said we would invigorate our economy by giving people greater freedom and incentives to take risks, and letting them keep more of what they earned. We did what we promised, and a great industrial giant is reborn.

Tonight, we can take pride in 25 straight months of economic growth, the strongest in 34 years; a three-year inflation average of 3.9 percent, the lowest in 17 years; and 7.3 million new jobs in two years, with more of our citizens working than ever before.

New freedom in our lives has planted the rich seeds for future success: for an America of wisdom that honors the family, knowing that as the family goes, so goes our civilization; for an America of vision that sees tomorrow's dreams in the

learning and hard work we do today; for an America of courage whose servicemen and women, even as we meet, proudly stand watch on the frontiers of freedom; for an America of compassion that opens its heart to those who cry out for help.

We have begun well. But it's only a beginning. We are not here to congratulate ourselves on what we have done, but to challenge ourselves to finish what has not yet been done.

We are here to speak for millions in our inner cities who long for real jobs, safe neighborhoods and schools that truly teach. We are here to speak for the American farmer, the entrepreneur and every worker in industries fighting to modernize and compete. And, we are here to stand, and proudly so, for all who struggle to break free from totalitarianism; for all who know in their hearts that freedom is the one true path to peace and human happiness.

Proverbs tell us, without a vision the people perish. When asked what great principle holds our Union together, Abraham Lincoln said, "Something in (the) Declaration giving liberty, ,not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time."

We honor the giants of our history not by going back, but forward to the dreams their vision foresaw. The time has come to proceed toward a great new challenge, a second American

revolution of hope and opportunity; a revolution carrying us to new heights of progress by pushing back frontiers of knowledge and'space; a revolution of spirit that taps the soul of America, enabling us to summon greater strength than we have ever known; and, a revolution that carries beyond our shores the golden promise of human freedom in a world at peace.

Let us begin by challenging our conventional wisdom. There are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, no barriers to our progress except those we ourselves erect. Already, pushing down tax rates has freed our economy to vault forward to record growth.

In Europe, they call it "the American miracle." Day by day, we are shattering accepted notions of what is possible. When I was growing up, we failed to see how a new thing called radio would transform our marketplace.

Well, today, many have not yet seen how advances in technology are transforming our lives.

In the late 1950s, workers at the AT&T semiconductor plant in Pennsylvania produced five transistors a day for 7 dollars and 50 cents a piece. They now produce over a million for less than a penny apiece.

New laser techniques could revolutionize heart bypass surgery, cut diagnosis time for viruses linked to cancer from weeks to' minutes, reduce hospital costs dramatically and hold out new promise for saving human lives.

We stand on the threshold of a great ability to produce more, do more, be more. Our economy is not getting older and weaker, it's getting younger and stronger; it doesn't need rest and supervision, it needs new challenge and greater freedom.

And that word freedom is the key to the second American revolution that we need to bring aqout.

Let us move together with a historic reform of tax simplification for fairness and growth.

We have cut tax rates by almost 25 percent, yet the tax system remains unfair and limits our potential for growth.

Exclusions and exemptions cause similar incomes to be taxed at different levels. Low-income families face steep tax barriers that make hard lives even harder. The Treasury Department has produced an excellent reform plan.

One thing that tax reform will not be is a tax increase in disguise. We will not jeopardize the mortgage interest deduction that families need. We will reduce personal tax rates as low as possible by removing many tax preferences. We will propose a top rate of no more than 35 percent, and possibly lower. And we will propose reducing corporate rates while maintaining incentives for capital formation.

To encourage opportunity and jobs rather than dependency and welfare, we will propose that individuals living at or near the poverty line be totally exempt from federal income tax. To restore fairness to families, we will propose increasing significantly the personal exemption.

Tax simplification will be a giant step toward unleashing the tremendous pent-up power of our economy. But a second American revolution must carry the promise of opportunity for all. It is time to liberate the spirit of enterprise in the most distressed areas of our country.

This Government will meet its responsibility to help those in need. But policies that increase dependency, break up families and destroy self-respect are not progressive, they are reactionary. Despite our strides in civil rights, blacks, Hispanics and all minorities will not have full and equal power until they have full economic power.

We have repeatedly sought passage of enterprise zones to help those in the abandoned corners of our land find jobs, learn skills and build better lives. There must be no forgotten Americans. Let us place new dreams in' a million hearts and create a new generation of entrepreneurs by passing enterprise zones this year.

Nor must we lose the chance to pass our youth employment opportunity wage proposal. We can help teenagers who have the highest unemployment rate find summer jobs, so they can know the pride of work and have confidence in their futures.

Our Administration is already encouraging certain lowincome public housing residents to own and manage their own dwellings. It is time that all public housing residents have that opportunity of ownerShip.

The Federal Government can help create a new atmosphere of freedom. But states and localities, many of which enjoy surpluses from the recovery, must not permit their tax and regulatory policies to stand as barriers to growth.

Let us resolve that we will stop spreading dependency and start spreading opportunity; that we will stop spreading bondage and start spreading freedom.

There are some who say that growth initiatives must await final action on deficit reductions. Well, the best way to reduce deficits is through economic growth. More businesses will be started, more investments made, more jobs created and more people will be on payrolls paying taxes. The best way to reduce government spending is to reduce the need for spending by increasing prosperity. Each added percentage point per year of real GNP growth will lead to cumulative reduction in deficits of nearly $200,000 million over five years.

T

o move steadily toward a balanced budget, we must also lighten government's claim on our total economy. We will not do this by raising taxes. We must make sure that our economy grows faster than the growth in spending by the Federal Government.

In our Fiscal Year 1986 budget, overall government spending will be frozen at the current level; it must not be one dime higher than Fiscal Year 1985. Three points are key: First, the social safety net for the elderly, the needy, the disabled and unemployed will be left intact. Growth of our major health care programs, Medicare and Medicaid, will be slowed, but protections for the elderly and needy will be preserved.

Second, we must not relax our efforts to restore military strength just as we near our goal of a fully equipped, trained and ready professional corps. National security is government's first responsibility, so, in past years, defense spending took about half the federal budget. Today it takes less than a third.

We have already reduced our planned defense expenditures by nearly $100,000 million over the past four years, and reduced projected spending again this year. You know, we only have a military industrial complex until a time of danger. Then it becomes the arsenal of democracy. Spending for defense is investing in things that are priceless: peace and freedom.

Third, we must reduce or eliminate costly government subsidies. For example, deregulation of the airline industry has led to cheaper airfares, but on Amtrak [railroads], taxpayers pay about $35 per passenger every time an Amtrak train leaves the station. It's time we ended this huge federal subsidy.

Our farm program costs have quadrupled in recent years.

humble our jobs. We have seen a powerful new current from an Yet I know from vISItIng farmers, many in great financial distress, that we need an orderly transition to a market~oriented old and honorable tradition, American generosity. farm economy. We can help farmers best not by expanding From thousands answering Peace Corps appeals to help boost federal payments, but by making fundamental reforms, keeping food production in Africa, to millions volunteering time, corporainterest rates heading down and knocking down foreign trade tions adopting schools and communities pulling together to help barriers to American farm exports. the neediest among us at home, we have refound our values.

Private sector initiatives are crucial to our future.

We are moving ahead with the Grace Commission reforms In the area of education, we're returning to excellence, and to eliminate waste and improve government's management again, the heroes are our people, not government.

We're practices. In the long run, we must protect the taxpayers from stressing basics of discipline, rigorous testing and homework, government.

And I ask again that [Congress] pass, as 32 states have now called for, an amendment mandating the Federal while helping children become computer-smart as well. For 20 years, Scholastic Aptitude Test scores of our high school Government spend no more than it takes in. And I ask for the students went down. But now they have gone up two of the last authority used responsibly by 43 governors to veto individual . three years. items in appropriation bills.

We must go forward in our commitment to the new basics, Nearly 50 years of government living beyond its means has brought us to a time of reckoning. Ours is but a moment in giving parents greater authority and making sure good teachers are rewarded for hard work and achievement through history. But one moment of courage, idealism and bipartisan merit pay. unity can change American history forever.

Just as we are positioned as never before to secure justice in our economy, we are poised as never before to create a safer, ound monetary policy is the key to long-running econofreer, more peaceful world. mic strength and stability. We will continue to cooperate Our alli(;lnces are stronger than ever. Our economy is with the Federal Reserve Board, seeking a steady policy stronger than ever. We have resumed our historic role as a that ensures price stability without keeping interest rates leader of the free world. And all of these together are a great artificially high or needlessly holding down growth. force for peace.

Reducing unneeded red tape and regulations, and deregSince 1981, we have been committed to seeking fair and ulating the energy, transportation and financial industries, have verifiable arms agreements that would lower the risk of war and unleashed new competition, giving consumers more choices, reduce the size of nuclear arsenals. Now our determination to better services and lower prices. In just one set of grant maintain a strong defense has influenced the Soviet Union to programs we have reduced 905 pages of regulations to 31. return to the bargaining table. Our negotiators must be able to Every dollar the Federal Government does not take from go to that table with the united support of the American people. us, every decision it does not make for us, will make our All of us have no greater dream than to see the day when economy stronger, our lives more abundant, our future nuclear weapons are banned from this earth forever. more free.

For the past 20 years we have believed that no war will be Our second American revolution will push on to new possibilities not only on earth-but launched as long as each side knows it can retaliate with a in the next frontier of deadly counterstrike.

Well, I believe there is a better way of space. Despite budget restraints, we will seek record funding eliminating the threat of nuclear war. for research and development.

It is a Strategic Defense Initiative aimed ultimately at We have seen the success of the space shuttle. Now we ani finding a nonnuclear defense against ballistic missiles. It is the going to develop a permanently-manned space station and new most hopeful possibility of the nuclear age. But it's not very opportunities for free enterprise, because in the next decade, Americans and our friends around the world will be living and well understood.

Some say it will bring war to the heavens-but its purpose is working together in space.

In the zero-gravity of space, we could manufacture in 30 to deter war in the heavens and on earth. Now, some say the research would be expensive. Perhaps, but it could save mildays lifesaving medicines it would take 30 years to make on lions of lives, indeed humanity itself. And some say if we build earth. We can make crystals of exceptional purity to produce supercompute'rs, creating jobs, technologies and medical breaksuch a system, the Soviets will build a defense system of their throughs beyond anything we ever dreamed possible. own. They already have strategic defenses that surpass ours; As we do all this, we will continue to protect our natural a civil defense system where we have almost none; and a research program covering roughly the same areas of technoresources. We will seek reauthorization and expanded funding logy that we're now exploring.

And finally, some say the for the Superfund program, to continue cleaning up hazardous research will take a long time. Well, the answer to that is: waste sites which threaten human health and the environment.

There is another great heritage to speak of this evening. Of "Let's get started." all the changes that have swept America the past four years, Harry Truman once said that, ultimately, our security, and none brings greater promise than our rediscovery of the values the world's hopes for peace and human progress "lie not in of faith, freedom, family, work and neighborhood. measures of defense or in the control of weapons, but in the We see signs of renewal in increased'attendance in places of growth and expansion of freedom and self-government." worship; renewed optimism and faith in our future; love of And tonight, we declare anew to our fellow citizens of the country rediscovered by our young, who are leading the way. world: Freedom is not the sole prerogative of a chosen few; it is We have rediscovered that work is good in and of itself, that it the universal right of all God's children. Look to where peace ennobles us to create and contribute no matter how seemingly and prosperity flourish today. It is in homes that freedom built.

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Victories against poverty are the greatest and peace most secure where people live by laws that ensure free press, free speech and freedom to worship, vote and create wealth.

Our mission is to nourish and defend freedom and democracy, and to communicate these ideals everywhere we can.

America's economic success is freedom's success; it can be repeated a hundred times in a hundred different nations. Many countries in East Asia and the Pacific have few resources other than the enterprise of their own people. But through low tax rates and free markets, they have soared ahead of centralized economies. And now China is opening up its economy to meet its needs.

We need a stronger and simpl~r approach to the process of making and implementing trade policy and will be studying potential changes in that process in the next few weeks.

We have seen the benefits of free trade and lived through the disasters of protectionism. Tonight, I ask all our trading partners, developed and developing alike, to join us in a new round of trade negotiations to expand trade and competition, and strengthen the global economy-and to begin it in the next year.

There are mOle than 3,000 million human beings living in Third World countries, with an average per capita income of $650 a year. Many are victims of dictatorships that impoverish them with taxation and corruption. Let us ask our allies to join us in a practical program of trade and assistance that fosters economic development through personal incentives to help these people climb from poverty on their own.

We cannot play innocents abroad in a world that is not innocent. Nor can we be passive when freedom is under siege.

Without resources, diplomacy cannot succeed. Our security assistance programs help friendly governments defend themselves, and give them confidence to work for peace.

We must stand by all our democratic allies. And we must not break faith with those who are risking their lives on every continent, from Afghanistan to Nicaragua.

Tonight, I have spoken of great plans and great dreams.

They are dreams we can make come true. Two hundred years of American history should have taught us that nothing is impossible.

History is asking us once again to be a force for good in the world. Let us begin in unity, with justice, and love.

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Huckleberry Finn,Alive at 100 spoken of it as kin to a first novel because it is so young and so fresh and so all-out silly in some of the chances it takes and , even wins. A wiser older novelist would never play that far out when the work was already well along and so neatly in hand.

But Twain does.

For the sake of literary propriety, let me not, however, lose sight of the actual context. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel of the 19th century and its grand claims to literary magnitude are also to be remarked upon. So I will say that the first measure of a great novel may be that it presents-like a human of palpable charisma-an all-but-visible aura. Few works of literature can be so luminous without the presence of some majestic symbol. In Huckleberry Finn we are presented (given the possible exception of Anna Livia Plurabelle) with the best river ever to flow through a novel, our own Mississippi, and in the voyage down those waters of Huck Finn and a runaway slave on their raft, we are held in the thrall of the river. Larger than a character, the river is a manifest presence, a demiurge to support the man and the boy, a deity to betray them, feed them, all but drown them, fling them apart, float them back together. The river

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love affair was new and all seemed possible. How rich is the recollection of that emotion! What else is greatness but the indestructible wealth it leaves in the mind's recollection after hope has soured and passions are spent?

It is always the hope of democracy that our wealth will be there to spend again, and the ongoing treasure of Huckleberry Finn is that it frees us to think of democracy and its sublime, terrifying premise: Let the passions and cupidities and dreams and kinks and ideals and greed and hopes and foul corruptions of all men and women have their day and the world will still be better off, for there is more good than bad in the sum of us and our workings. Mark Twain, whole embodiment of that democratic human, understood the premise in every turn of his pen, and how he tested it, how he twisted and tantalized and tested it until we are weak all over again with our love for the idea.

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narrative wbich is nothing less than ~ ,. Ie dt _ the ongoing re"'1r.iJ1'= /, ~ lation between 41'\ ~ Huck and the runaway slave, this Nigger Jim I ';;.,'ÂĽ ~'0ffI â&#x20AC;˘ \ whose name embodies the very stuff of the sfave system itself-his name is not Jim but Nigger Jim. The growth of love and knowledge between the runaway white and the runaway black is a relation equal to the relation of the men to the river for it is also full of betrayal and nourishment, separation and return. So it manages to touch that last fine nerve of the heart where compassion and irony speak to one another and thereby give a good turn to our most protected emotions.

Reading Huckleberry Finn one comes to realize all over again that the nearAbout the Author: Norman Mailer won the burned-out, throttled, hate-filled dying National Book A ward, (he Pulitzer Prize and affair between whites and blacks is still the Polk A ward for The Armies of the Night our great national love affair, and woe to in 1969. His published works include fiction, us if it ends in detestation and mutual nonfiction, plays, poems and screenplays. His misery. Riding the current of this novel, latest novel, Tough Guys Don't Dance, was we are back in that happy time when the published in August 1984. /~,~=~,<,

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Giving Workers a Voice Employee involvement. Workplace democracy. Quality of work life. Whatever the label given to them, programs designed to give workers a role in decision making, have improved efficiency, boosted morale and increased productivity in a number of leading American companies.

Sometimes a universe can be summed up in a fragment: Late one afternoon, crammed into a conference room in a Ford Motor Company factory in Sharonville, .Ohio, a dozen men in jeans and khakis and thick work shoes were talking about Steve Sandman's fan. The whine and throb of the lathes and drill presses could be heard through the walls.

"We can take an air-movement reading," John DeLucca, an engineer, was saying, "but if it's adequate, then you'll have to see the plant engineer."

Steve Sandman was not impressed.

Factory work can be stifling, dreary, physically exhausting; a fan makes a difference. Sandman contended that the fan in his work area was too far away to provide any relief. "Come down on one of the hot days," Sandman told DeLucca.

A fan can become a symbol of powerfor a union, for a giant corporation.

Labor grievances are filed over such issues; they can spark bitter, destructive strikes that paralyze a town or an industry. The 3,500 workers at the huge Ford plant have another option. They are part of a remarkable program known as E.I., employee involvement, that gives them a personal voice in the decisions that govern their work lives. Their complaints and solutions-from installing new fans to demanding better manufacturing quality control to designing new production techniques-can be heard by a team of fellow workers with the power to do something about them.

During the last several years, similar programs have been set up in hundreds of plants across the United States. Where

they take hold, they can dramatically improve the workplace environment and boost efficiency. In 1980, when E.!. was established at the Ford plant at Sharonville, there were strong rumors that the factory was going to be shut down. The auto and truck transmissions it produced were the worst in the company; at any one time, 500 labor grievances were being processed. Today; according to the company, the quality of the transmissions has improved by 60 percent; grievances are down to 50 and the workers have been given assurances that the plant will survive until at least 1990. Company and union alike believe that E.!. made most of the difference.

The notion that worker participation can increase corporate profits is an old story. It has been preached by many American scholars for decades, and other nations-Japan, Germany and Sweden among them-have long since accepted it. But most American managers saw E.I. as slow, inefficient and a radical challenge to their control of production, while many workers saw it as a device for undermining the union. Now, lagging American productivity and Japanese competition have spurred unions and companies to give it a try. Projects labeled "workplace democracy" or "quality of worklife" have sprouted in companies ranging from Citicorp to General Electric to Xerox. Such programs could have a significant impact on America's ability to compete in the world marketplace.

The results have been far from perfect.

Many programs are superficial. Even the

majority of serious projects eventually fall victim to management impatience, union distrust or hard economic times.

Yet leaders on both sides of the bargaining table acknowledge the value of worker participation, and the movement seems to be gaining momentum. According to some estimates, more than 2 million workers are active participants in E.!. programs, and the recent contract agreements between the United Auto Workers (UA W) and the auto companies called for further strengthening [see SPAN May 1981, June 1982 and September 1983].

A number of corporations, including General Motors, have actually given worker teams major responsibilities for designing new products.

According to supporters like Jerome M. Rosow, president of Work in America Institute Inc., a private research group, the advantages of worker involvement' have only begun to be realized. E.!., he believes, produces a power-sharing arrangement under which both employees and managers do their jobs better. And there is another, littlerecognized benefit: given these incentives, workers find solutions that no outside manager could possibly imagine.

Says Robert H. Guest, professor emeritus of organizational behavior at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, and one of the nation's foremost experts on the workplace: "There is a gold mine of creativity that can be unleashed at the lower levels." [Guest is the author of "The Quality of Work Life," SPAN May 1981.]

In 1957, Ford opened. its newest

transmission plant amid the cornfields and commitment of American corporatiol)s woodlots of southwestern Ohio, about 20 to the turn-of-the-century theories of kilometers north of Cincinnati. The tan Frederick Winslow Taylor: If workers one-story factory sprawled over 21 hec- were paid reasonable wages, if the work tares. At first, morale there was high: the was scientifically organized and the workwork force was new to the tensions and ers were given detailed instructions, they physical demands of an automobile plant, would do the job adequately. Ford Motor and the wages were the highest in the Company was a true believer, practicing area. what Taylor preached.

But gradually, the atmosphere changed.

The growth of the union movement Though a far cry from the days when over the years forced important changes Henry Ford hired armies of private in company treatment of employees. policemen for pitched battles with union Occasional worker-involvement proorganizers, Ford management practices grams yielded dramatic results, including were firmly bureaucratic. Employees at the 70 percent cut in normal production Sharonville often responded by malinger- times for construction of Liberty ships in ing or by slavishly following every item of World War II. Yet most business and the work contract. labor executives rem3ined doubters.

"Anyone with a tie, we didn't trust," During the 1970s, as American manufacturing languished and foreign competirecalls James Walker, a 20-year veteran at the plant who is now the union tion increased, reform notions began to be considered more seriously. The examcoordinator of the employee-involvement program. When a foreman ordered that a ple of worker loyalty in the successes of procedure-a way of machining a part or Japanese industry could no longer be organizing an assembly line-be changed ignored.

Both management and union at Ford's in the interest of increasing productivity, workers would shake their heads and Sharonville plant understood the stakes, insist, "Call the committeeman." The but the introduction of employee involvecommitteeman, the union representative ment wasn't easy. Factorjes are comin disputes over the contract, would file a munities with the traditions and class grievance that might take weeks or divisions of communities; they resist the months to resolve. Meanwhile, produc- introduction of new ideas and new 'ways tivity would remain static. of working and governing.

A brief wildcat strike closed the plant "Ford is a traditional organization," in 1973. The quality of the 4,100 trans- says Thomas McCaffrey, a 59-year-old with gray hair and metal-rimmed glasses, missions turned out each day plummeted. "and I'm a traditional plant manager. I "We couldn't give those things away," says James Miller, the recently elected like being the boss and I like giving the president of the local union. The 1979 orders and I like immediate response and recession and the depression in the auto no bull. That's been my style for 20 industry heightened the problems: the . years." Among the salaried, white-collar plant was shut down for several weeks, employees, the "middle class" of the and rumors spread that Ford would close factory community, many felt E.!. was window dressing, a way to pacify the the Sharonville plant in 1985.

Meanwhile, new leaders with new atti- union. And some union people thought tudes were taking over top posts in both the proposal was a management trick to union and company. In 1979, the UAW increase production while giving workers and Ford agreed as part of that year's the appearance of participation without labor contract to try workplace participa- changing the fundamental power struction, and the following year the Sharon- ture.

McCaffrey was appointed plant manaville factory became one of the company's first pilot sites. Donald Ephlin, ger in 1980. He had worked for Ford for director of the union's Ford Department, more than 30 years, and had a formidable and Peter J. Pestillo, the company's vice- reputation. "He could flat ream you out," president for labor relations, guided the says Chester Charlton, the coordinator for the white-collar side of E.I. "He was development of the program. the best I ever saw. I've seen him flat Experiments in cooperative work in the United States date back to the 1800s ream people, and keep in mind these and such utopian communities as New were guys themselves who were first class Harmony, Oneida and Brook Farm. But at it."

But being a manager like that can take efforts to apply these ideas in industry foundered, in large measure because of its toll. One day, as McCaffrey tells it, he

went home in a dark mood and wondered aloud to his wife whether all this was worth it. She had heard him talk about workplace participation. Why don't you try it? she asked. It represented a major turnaround for him, but McCaffrey decided to take her advice. Says Robert Guest, the Dartmouth expert who has served as a consultant to the Sharonville plant: "Tom had a religious experience."

McCaffrey was aware that Ford Motor had agreed in principle to try employeeinvolvement projects, but he knew he needed bright, energetic, committed union leaders to make it work in Sharonville. In fact, they were on hand.

Jim Miller, a direct man with an earthy vocabulary, was then the shop chairman.

He was suspicious of the overtures to set up an E.!. program-and nervous about appearing too close to management, the kiss of death for elected union officials.

But Miller wanted to save the plant. In the summer of 1980, a steering committee comprising six company men and six union men chose the employee who would head the project, Kenneth Seyfried. He was a cost analyst with a degree in accounting from the University of Cincinnati, and he was known to work well with people.

Early on, Seyfried called a meeting in one of the production departments to set up one of the first E.!. teams, but 16 workers walked out of the room. They wanted to hear the union position from a union man. Shortly, in spite of angry protests from many executives, the Sharonville E.!. became the first in the company to give a union man equal rank at the top of the program. James Walker, a bearded shop steward, was made union coordinator, with Seyfried as company coordinator.

Seyfried and Walker immersed themselves in the literature of management science and workplace participation. (Today, they both pride themselves on the fact that they are, in Seyfried's words, "self-taught" in the field.) They ended up producing a 400-page manual, which is now the Bible of the employeeinvolvement program.

In the middle of the Sharonville plant, a warren of offices has been dedicated to employee involvement, and that's where the matter of Steve Sartdman's fan was under discussion. Sandman was saying that if the fan were closer-rather than 9 meters away from his work post-it would help get rid of the smoke from his (Text continued on page 24)

Jobs for the Future The computer age is here. So, throw out the typewriter, but not the typist. Just give him or her a few easy lessons on how to operate the computer. The experts have always said it. And now the U.S. Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) confirms the happy truth-computerization does not mean unemployment.

But, yes, it does herald major changes in the work scene. There will be new ways of working, different kinds of jobs. As newer applications for computers are found, a whole new world of job categories will open up.

Unemployment, BLS stresses in a recent report, will not go up. But what you learn as a young person will not be enough to carry you through a lifetime of work. Many

people will certainly have to make adjustments, learn new skills. Career changes and retraining are going to be more frequent in the years to come. Certain jobs and job skills will turn obsolete-but there will be enough new jobs to accommodate the workers. For example, where robots replace workers, the old workers can find new work in programming, repairing or monitoring the robots.

Many of the new jobs are, of course, going to be in the technical field-computer design and maintenance, software and manufacturing. Physicists, engineers and environmental specialists will be in great demand. Yet occupations projected to grow the fastest and to have the largest number of openings in the next decade, are not in the

high-tech industries-but in the service sector. The greatest number of job openings in the next couple of decades is expected to be for secretaries, nurses' aides, janitors, sales clerks, cashiers and other clerical 'and service employees. Of course, they will be working with more computerized work-aids.

Health services will boom-because of the growing and aging U.S. population.

According to BLS statistics some 2.7 million new jobs will be generated in health care alone by 1990. With new developments in medicine, there will be a demand for workers to provide the new services to patients.

Increasing numbers of occupational therapists will be needed to help disabled people become more mobile and productive. Progress in genetic engineering will create jobs

1. Technicians learn about the working of a digital cash register. With increasing use of sophisticated equipment in every field, there will be a need for people who can repair them. 2. Secretaries-the occupation with the greatest number of projected openings-can expect more computerized office equipment. 3. A production test operator checks integrated circuit dies. There will be more jobs for such skilled personnel. 4. Another high growth ratejob-supermarket cashiers. Computerized equipment will make their jobs easier and transactions speedier.

for chemists and biologists.

The look of the workforce too will change-more women, more older people (the post-World War II baby boom generation will be in its prime age), more minorities, fewer younger people (thanks to lower birth rates in the 1960s and 1970s). Workers will have a bigger say in decision making, work hours will be flexible, more people will work at home-yes, on computers. And thanks to speedier methods of working, people will have more leisure time-which will mean more jobs in the entertainment and leisure industries.

Far from fearing unemployment, Americans have to look forward to meeting. the challenges of a dynamic, evolving workworld.

0

5. Therapist Brenda Johnson (in the driver's seat) demonstrates a prototype driving simulator for use by paraplegics. A 63 percent increase is projected in occupational therapy jobs by 1990.

6. Businesses will hire economists-like the one shown here-to help in planning, leading to a 42 percent increase in economists outside the academic community by 1990.7. An expert with a laser-illuminated terrain model which gives pilots a view of earth. With lasersfinding uses in several areas, there will be a demand for those who can design, build and operate laser systems.

machine. John DeLucca, the engineer, shook his head. "You only put fans up to get air movement," he said. "You never put fans up to blow smoke."

When DeLucca left, Sandman expressed his continuing doubts: "He ain't going to do nothing." But Harold O'Meara, a quality-control inspector who was running the session, was optimistic. "He said he'd be down Tuesday," O'Meara said, adding that if no action was taken, higher authorities would be brought in.

The next Tuesday, John DeLucca showed up in Steve Sandman's area and took readings of the air quality. Nothing happened for a few days, but then a maintenance crew showed up. One fan that had been damaged was repaired; the intake screen on another fan was cleaned and the blade angle adjusted. Finally the crew installed a new fan and aimed it in Steve Sandman's direction. By all accounts, Sandman was satisfied.

Sharonville's employee-involvement program is run by a committee with equal representation from management and labor; it meets twice a month. The program itself consists of two sets of teams, both of which meet weekly, on company time-the 64 production-floor teams primarily made up of blue-collar, hourly workers, and the 16 teams made up of white-collar, salaried employees.

Participation is voluntary for hourly workers. It is officially voluntary for salaried workers asked to take part in the white-collar teams, but ambitious employees seldom turn down an invitation.

About 20 percent of the factory's blue-collar employees take part, which the E.l. staff says is close to the optimum size. The production teams usually consist of 8 to 10 hourly workers plus a so-called "facilitator" representing the employee-involvement office headed by Seyfried and Walker, plus representatives from the engineering, maintenance and other departments. These "support people," as they're known, enable the teams to work out solutions directly without having to involve other levels of management.

The hourlong meetings are informal, and the teams set their own agendas. At first, says Ken Seyfried, the workers focused mainly on "creature comforts."

The paper towels that had littered the floor of one restroom vanished after more efficient towel dispensers had been instal-

the $15 or so the company spends for a led. New coat racks and filing cabinets worker's weekly hour at a team meeting. and lights have appeared. The former executive dining room has been con- "Y ou make up for the one hour with the verted into an exercise room, which is other 39 hours," he says.

During its four years at Sharonville, available to all employees. (Executives the employee-involvement program has now eat in the cafeteria.)

But about 60 percent of the items on had its share of problems. Many hourly the teams' agendas now concern manu- workers have refused to become involved facturing quality. One team pointed out in the program, for a variety of reasons. that pieces of lint were falling off their "We've got people who see work as a thing to do," says Chester Charlton, "and gloves and fouling machinery; lint-free gloves were purchased. Another team they go ahead and do it, and they don't demonstrated to the engineers that two want to be bothered by meeting with small cylinders could be used to replace a other people to discuss things." single larger cylinder on a machine, with Workers often cite personal reasons for refusing to participate, even though they savings of $700 a week.

The production teams can be tough on may give the employee-involvement procompanies that sell to the plant. One ject itself high grades. Leroy Millender, vendor was given an ultimatum: Improve who works on brake-drum assembly, your product over the next two weeks or worked on an E.!. team for more than a you've made your last sale here. The year, and says that the project has imvendor ignored the warning and found his proved morale and quality in the plant. product barred from the plant. "You had But he recently changed departments and to be there seven or eight weeks later," now, he says, he feels no desire to one worker commented, "when those continue with E.!. "I don't get along that people came back to the meeting and told well with my new foreman to particiwhat they had done at their facility to pate," he says. correct the problem." Seyfried puts it in Some white-collar people are only halfthese terms: "E.I. people won't run hearted participants. "We've got people junk." who are authority figures and who workAbout 30 percent of the plant'S s;tlaried ed for a lot of years to become authority employees serve on teams. Team deci- figures," Charlton says. "They see E.!. in sions are approved at the lowest possible a sense of losing power." And salaried level of the factory bureaucracy; only if a workers inevitably tend to be more team's plan is initially rejected does it guarded in their comments at E.!. meetmove up the chain of command. Eyen an Tngs because, unlike-the blue-coilar workinitial rejection by McCaffrey, the plant ers, their careers are in the balance.

Even McCaffrey, the plant manager, manager, may not spell defeat-an appeal can be taken to the joint commit- admits to having difficulties with the tee. If a plan is returned to McCaffrey program. "Occasionally we all fall off the and he denies it a second time, the plan is wagon," he says. "Once in a while it's difficult to keep your mouth shut when dead-but that has never happened.

The major goal of the employee- somebody from the hourly work force involvement program is not, actually, to comes in and asks questions about things come up with individual solutions to you would normally say is 'None of your problems on the factory floor. In fact, the damn business.'"

E.!. coordinators have had to be careful Some months ago, McCaffrey called to avoid matters covered in the UA W- the plant's workers together in two meetFord contract; the program is not in- ings in the plant cafeteria and addressed tended as a substitute for the grievance workers in stern terms, saying they must system. continue to meet production quotas.

What both company and union want James Miller was outraged because he out of E.!. is a good relationship between felt it was unfair and unproductive to the two parties. "We're after communica- chastise the plant's entire work force tion," Seyfried stresses. "The problem- when only a small number of workers was solving is gravy." Of course, better work- at fault. "He still doesn't understand er morale has its own payoff: it can what the E.!. system means," Miller dramatically raise a plant's productivity. snapped.

McCaffrey says he doesn't worry about Yet Miller is among the large majority

in negative ways. Now some of them are releasing it in positive,ways." of workers, managers and outside authorities who view Sharonville as a roaring success. Jerome Rosow, president of a work-research organization, believes Sharonville is "the showcase of what is happening in worker involvement in America."

Says Chester Charlton: "Some of the worst hourly people who worked for me are now E.!. leaders, working three to four hours a week on their own time to get things done. It's uncanny." His explanation: "We got people with a lot of energy, and when their energy is restricted, they find ways-always did-to release it in negative ways. Now some of them-not all-are releasing it in positive ways."

Even most foremen seem happy with the program. "E.!. doesn't reduce my authority," says one. "It means some other people are taking over some of the workload that I would normally have to do."

"Sharonville is one of our better ones," says Peter Pestillo, Ford's vice-president for labor relations, careful not to slight the company's other employee-involvement programs. There are many, 86 in 15 states. "In a very real sense," Pestillo says, "we have undergone in a few . short years a sort of corporate cultural revolution."

The company says it gets a return of $5 for each dollar spent on E.!. programs.

Since 1980, Ford claims to have improved the quality of its automobiles and trucks by 55 percent. Philip Caldwell, the soonto-retire company chairman, attributes much of that achievement to the employee-involvement programs. Pestil10 says that executives at Ford must demonstrate commitment to worker participation and an ability to function in the new E.!. environment if they are to be advanced to higher positions.

Pestillo's counterpart at General Motors (GM), Alfred S. Warren Jr., takes the same position. GM cannot be competitive without such programs, Warren says. Each of the company's 151 American facilities has some form of employee participation. Many are limited to sections of plants and may involve 50 to 200 workers; other programs are more extensive.

In a 1982 survey by the New York Stock Exchange, 41 percent of companies with more than 500 employees said they

had worker-management partiCipation programs. According to John Simmons, professor of labor-management relations at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, some 2.3 million workers actively take part in such projects.

When the first E.!. programs began, they were viewed with great suspicion by most union members and leaders. In fact, companies do sometimes enter upon workplace-cooperation programs in an effort to weaken the union. And some companies do give lip service to the idea of worker participation while hiring antiunion consultants to resist union organizing drives.

Union leaders who support E.!. can find themselves in deep trouble because of the suspicions of the rank-and-file.

Donald Ephlin, then director of the UA W's Ford department, worked so closely with Peter Pestillo, of Ford, in developing the employee-involvement program that many Ford workers felt he had become a captive of management.

According to several high-ranking union officers, this perception, which most of them insist is not true, played a role in his failure to win the union presidency when Douglas A. Fraser retired in 1983.

Most worker-participation programs are short-lived, particularly those that are not built upon an essential change in the power relationships in a plant. Says Ken Seyfried of Sharonville, "If you take the management structure on the shop floor and transfer it to a room for an hour, that's not participation."

But management is wary about the delicate balance between giving workers serious decision-making roles and losing control of the plant. "Power sharing," says Jerome Rosow, "is foreign to the normal decision-making process built up in big business. There should be a power transfer, but in the final analysis power must rest with management."

The number of work-reform programs in which management yields important power is limited. Paul Goodman, a professor at Carnegie-Mellon University, says that only 25 percent of all programs, meaningful or not, last beyond five years.

Many business schools place little or no emphasis on worker participation. Instead, according to John Simmons, the University of Massachusetts professor, they stress management tactics that at bottom represent a traditional authoritar-

ianism. "Unless they have actually seen it in action in offices and plants," he says of many business-school faculty members, "they think it is some kind of socialism."

Yet gradually the notion of worker participation seems to be catching on in the United States.

There are also an increasing number of programs that gLveworkers new kinds of responsibilities. One of the most dramatic is General Motors' "Saturn" project, aimed at producing a radically different and technologically advanced family of small cars to compete with the Japanese and other foreign automobile manufacturers. The vehicle is not scheduled to be introduced until 1988 or 1989. Meanwhile, the development of the design, manufacturing and assembly of the Saturn cars has been placed in the hands of hourly and salaried employees working together on project teams.

In the new GM-UA W contract, the company, as part of the job-security provisions of the contract, has pledged to recommend to the company's board that if concepts developed by the GM-UA W joint study teams can be worked out in practice by union and management, vehicles developed under the Saturn project will be manufactured in the United States, not abroad.

At Sharonville these days, the employee-involvement program is in transition. Jim Miller, the shop chairman who presided over the introduction and development of E.!., has been elected president of the union local. The election was in part a vote of confidence in the worker-participation program, an indication that it has won the support of most rank-and-file workers.

According to Ken Seyfried, once a program like the one at Sharonville is firmly established, it is going to continue.

Once the workers have been given some authority, he says, and have shown how much of their work can be performed autonomously-once they have shown that workers, not employers, often know â&#x20AC;˘ best how a job should be doneemployee-involvement programs cannot be halted.

"When you teach a bear to dance," he says, "only the bear can decide to stop dancing."

0 About the Author: William Serrin is a correspondent for The New York Times. He specializes in writing on labor and the workplace.

In Quest oflndianAI¡t Several years ago, Henry Schoebel, right, a young¡ Washington artist, came across a volume of Indian miniature art in a library, and it changed his entire style. His quest to learn more won him a fellowship, and he is presently in this country to study Indian art more closely.

1. Cloverleaf: Oil enamel on wood, 107 em. X 107 em.

2. Hello?: Oil enamel on wood, 427 em. X 165 em.

3. Galatea: Oil enamel on wood, 427 em. Lx213 em. Hx183 em.

1983;

4. The Figure: Oil enamel on wood, 1984;

1984;

5. Untitled: Rhoplex/pigmenf, earand'aehe,

152 em.

X

114 em.

1976; 61 em.

1980; W.

X

46 em. .

he work of Henry Leo Schoebel, 30, is interesting in more ways than the obvious one-that it is consciously inspired and influenced by the miniature tradition of Indian painting. Schoebel i~ an artist by training. He obtained his bachelor's degree in fine arts (BFA) from Syracuse University in New York State in 1971 and his master's (MFA) in the same subject from the University of Maryland in 1980.

Henry Schoebel is currently on a study tour of India, where he intends to share views with Indian artists and learn more about the different schools of painting in this country.

We talked about what he does, what inspires him and how he will go about using the knowledge he gains through his travels in this part of the world.

His laminated planks of wood, "story boards" as he calls them, painted with layer upon layer of oil and enamel in brilliant reds and golds, blues and greens, create a jewellike elegance that recalls the opulence of an illuminated Jain manuscript or a Moghul miniature or, perhaps, a cross between them and a Byzantine icon. The overlays of color and patterning are self-consciously decorative, abstract at first glance but giving way, ultimately, to recognizable images drawn from a personal urge to narrate a story, much like the hieratic art of the Pada painters of Rajasthan or of Orissa. But beyond the visual density of Schoebel's imagery, beyond the esoterica, the symmetry, the ornamental exuberance and the playful, childlike urge to confound and confuse with secret codes and visual clues, there is another message. It lies in the very contemporaneity of his experience, in the content of his work.

In a sense, his Cloverleaf, a mandala of the highways, a summation of the Sacred Way in our own time, is as American as Hello?, a piece about being busy and about the communication gap. The central figure is flanked by the growing entanglement of contemporary life-telephones (transitional-both dial and pushbutton) and Rolodexes, symbols at once specific and general, anecdotal and mythic. As one American critic put it: "The piece rings constantly."

The audience, it is truly said, always completes a work of art, whether in the Berkeleyan notion of perception or in the code of comprehension known as formal analysis. The role of the viewer in completing Schoebel's work is unusually prominent.

T

Unusually so for the West, that is. For Indians, such a narrational element is part of what savoring of art is all about. However American his experience, the language Schoebel chooses to express it is different; also his vision of the world and his own place in it. Opting for the intimacy and microcosmic worldview of the Indian miniature tradition, rejecting the heroic, man-isthe-center-of-the-universe mold of Western art, Schoebel is one of a new generation of American artists who are at once typically American in that they dare and are willing to risk their all.

SHANT A SERBJEET SINGH: If there was an area of creativity in which one thought the flow from West to East would not be reversed it seemed to be the visual arts. And yet what I am looking at right now is a modern Jain miniature you painted. How did you come to do this kind of work?

HENRY LEO SCHOEBEL: Quite honestly, by chance. As an undergraduate, I was doing some very large-scale paintings that grew out of the Abstract Expressionist tradition. Somehow I did not find it fulfilling my aesthetic concerns. Not that I had any concrete visual idea of what I wanted. Only a strong sense of some emotional and aesthetic preferences.

One, for instance, was the idea of preciousness, of narrative, of putting images back into my work. I liked the idea of things being decorative, of being able to establish an intimacy with a work of art. I just wasn't getting this satisfaction from the work I was doing. In my search, in order to resolve my own aesthetic dilemmas, I would often go down to the library and take a look here and there. One day, by chance, I pulled out a book of Indian miniatures.

Immediately, I recognized in the miniatures almost everything I had been looking for-intimacy, decoration, narration, humor, a sort of playfulness.

I was very excited about the discovery, thinking it was my own. Obviously, they had been around for a long time. It was just that I had never been exposed to them. I started by doing copies.

What exactly caught your eye, in terms of aesthetics. The compartmentalization of space?

Right. That was one. The idea that a number of themes could be expressed in one piece, by sealing off different areas. Most important of all, that it didn't have to be this

grandiose statement which I understood abstraction to be. I wanted to say a little about this, a little about that. I found it difficult to become intimate with large, abstract works. For the first time, when I opened this book on miniatures, I was forced to deal with something small and precious. I was forced to realize that there was something I could go back to, to take my time in unraveling, something that I could own and refer back to. Also, I was attracted by the colors, the opulence, the decoration which through most of my art education I had been told was a negative element. I found myself being drawn to this idea of repetition, of putting layer upon layer of color.

When did you first become aware that "repetition," as in the miniatures and your own work now, is not mechanical, as is generally believed in the West?

The more I practiced it, the more I became aware of this. Every mark that I made, seemed to have a subtle relationship to the one that preceded it. You begin by making a few marks, a few hours go by and you say, "Wait a minute ... I'm really thinking where these marks are going." Slowly you become aware of certain things that are happening to you: You begin to enjoy and revel in the subtle rather than the grandiose, the way one color or one pattern on top of another changes things dramatically.

You are not looking for immediate solutions; but for gradual ones. I have been doing this kind of work for seven years now. It has been an education for me, a great discovery.

Would you term your search and the response you are giving the outcome of a personal sense of protest?

Yes. My own experience of being educated at a time when abstraction was so important has had something to do with it.

A number of my professors-not.all-did try to halt my defection from the mainstream. I remember when I first showed my pieces based on miniatures, one of my professors came in and said, "So what?"

That was his only criticism, not very substantial, simply dismissive. Things decorative and precious were seen as some kind of a cop-out from the Western way of thinking.

You were seen as getting involved in some kind of formula.

for-intimacy,

decoration, narration, humor, a sort ofplayfuln~ss."

outside the heroic, I-am-carrying-the-worldon-my-shoulders schemata which has been such a major concern of the Western artist?

Yes. When I would go into museums I would see these very large paintings, five and six meters across. No one could put them into their homes. And I began to ask: Who is this art for? I thought that certainly the everyday issues, the personal issues everyone has, the little intimacies one has, were just as important as these heroic issues. I just began to feel that I was lying. I was not a hero and I didn't want to make any statement if I had nothing to base it on.

I did have something to say about who I was and how I related to the world. I felt that in spite of what some of my teachers said about my work, this was my aesthetic vision and the only way I could work.

Well, just a little so far, because it was hard to find much on the subject. One thing that has been difficult for me, as a Western artist, to accept is the Indian tradition of not signing the work. I can appreciate and understand the notion of divorcing oneself from the creation but not the suggestion that the artist, as an individual, is not important.

Perhaps it could be looked at in another way. Instead of being .divorced from the work, the Indian artist aims at becoming one with it. The process could be described by the Sanskrit word, Sangam, meaning literally becoming one with the object.

In some respects this is already happening to me. My name is losing itself within the patterning of the work, falling deeper and deeper beneath the surface. Yet I can't deny my tradition either.

What are you sayi~g in a work like Hello? for example?

Basically it is about me and I suppose Do other artists of your generation also about a lot of other people and society sort feel the urge to break out of mainstream art of caught up in a complex web. You seem to activity? be locked¡ into this whole communication I would say quite a few do. The scene is trap and you become entangled in it until all very pluralistic in the States and there are a the little and intimate things of life lose their number of painters my age who have felt the significance because you are so busy trying need to express themselves through decorato figure out how to get through life. This tion. Artists everywhere have a responsibilwork is in the best miniature style and the ity to look at other streams of expression, if narrational thread and patterning are also they can get information about them. They must accept or reject but they can't deny strong. It could be enjoyed at two levelsthe space divisions of the miniatures are them and do nothing. While I don't advothere but instead of their gentle, pastoral cate modernism, I do think Western art has look at the world, I have injected the done a lot. Artists like Picasso and Matisse restlessness and energy that I suppose is and all those others of their level have given typically American. Basically, of course, I people everywhere a way to express someam a Western artist and certainly my whole thing th~y couldn't have done otherwise. life until now has been in the United States.

The issues that concern me are obviously A majority of contemporary Indian Western. It is just that I found through artists, too, have been deeply influenced by Eastern motifs or style a way of speaking, a Western art. How do you foresee your new language. In the West things are very interaction with them?

That interests me a great deal. It would busy, very vibrant. So here I am trying to fuse two different types of thought, at two be tragic if I didn't come to odds with some different levels. One is the level of just of them. I am looking forward to asking imagery; design and color. And then, if you them: "What did you see in Western art that want to spend some more time, you can you felt you had to draw upon?" In turn I begin to decipher my symbols, my iconog- will tell them what I saw in Indian art. I want raphy, how I use Western motifs such as road to be put in a position where Indian artists maps, modern communication devices, force me to assess why I am doing what I am things that a Westerner can instantly recog- doing and whether I am fooling myself. I nize. Of course, the sizeofthese works, too, is feel very strongly about what I am doing and I want to see how I come out of this. Of not miniature. course, at another level, I might do the same Have you read anything about Indian for them. All of us have to pose the question: What is going on here? Artists aesthetics yet?

everywhere are looking at ways in which they can add to the visual history of the world. Art is risk-taking. I could be wrong but this is the risk you have to take. You may work your whole life and you may have nothing to contribute. For me there is no going back. In a way, it is frightening to be in this situation, in a culture from which my artistic influences derive, being an artist myself when a lot of artists here are looking Westward. Frightening, because at home I was an innovator and here I am part of the mainstream, so to speak.

Apropos this risk-taking element in art, do you think your presence here-at a time when India is preparing a major cultural offering in the United States in the shape of the Festival of India-could have a catalytic effect?

Indeed. If artists are artists, I expect them to come up to me and ask: "How true are you?" As for American artists, they are too quick to judge. Even the few exhibitions

by Indian artists that I have seen show me how different these artists are and how their approaches vary. I feel very fortunate to be able to come here and see these differences and to educate my contemporaries about Indian art when I return. They are building a new Smithsonian Museum of Eastern Art which opens in 1986-87 and I am sure it will lead to a much greater exchange in the arts with India.

What are the specific things you would like to accomplish in India?

First, get some of my own work done.

Second, I would like to apprentice myself to some traditional Indian miniature painters, to learn some of their techniques and tools and maybe there will be an application of some of these techniques in my own work. I would also like to visit many libraries and collections of miniatures around India and get as much out of my trip as I can. Finally, of course, I must have a continuing dialogue with contemporary Indian artists and thrash out aesthetic dilemmas and influences. We will challenge each other, beginning with my sojourn at the School of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda.

0 About the Author: Shanta Serbjeet Singh is the dance critic for The Hindustan Times. She has also been writing a column on the fine arts for The Economic Times for the past 15 years. She has published two books-A'merica and You and

Nanak The Guru.

The Kindest Cuts

the n operating room, pain is the uninvited guest. Patients avoid suffering extreme pain in surgery, thanks mostly to anesthetics. Anesthesia, however, does not prevent postoperative soreness, which may last for days or weeks. This increases the length of hospital stays, raises costs and heightens the risk that fear will cause an individual to postpone needed surgery.

Now new technological variations on a centuries-old concept-chilling injured tissue to bring relief-is gaining popularity in many medical fields in the United States, bringing hope that surgical pain and inconvenience can be vastly reduced. Cryogenic surgery, or cryosurgery as the technique is called, replaces the surgeon's scalpel with an extremely cold metal probe that can not only deaden nerve sensations but also destroy unwanted tissue. A cryoprobe operates at temperatures so low that there is no bleeding.

"Cryosurgery's main advantage," says Donald Pasquale, director of product development and medical education at

I

by MIKE EDELHART

Cryomedics in Bridgeport, Connecticut, a major supplier of cryosurgical hardware, "is that it is mostly painless and bloodless, and often it is usable on an outpatient basis."

The first important medical use for controlled freezing came in the late 1800s, when doctors found that air, cooled until its component gases became liquid, could be sprayed on cotton swabs and used to remove warts and other skin lesions painlessly. For a period during this century doctors turned to the extreme cold produced by liquid nitrogen (minus 127 degrees C) to treat Parkinson's disease by freezing a part ofthe thalamus of the brain, because a brain malfunction causes the illness' symptomatic twitching and contortions. Since then, however, drug therapy has proved more effective and less risky than surgery.

Modern cryosurgical equipment uses hollow, silver probes cooled by a compressed refrigerant gas. By controlling the flow of gas, a doctor can chill or defrost the probe almost immediately, so that intense cold can be applied with pinpoint

Cold is numbing. Temperatures approaching absolute zero numb body tissues absolutely, deaden nerves for painless surgery. Facing page: A cryoprobe freezes a pituitary tumor during an operation. accuracy. In practice, the cryoprobe is applied at room temperature. The pressurized coolant flows through the hollow probe, chilling it in seconds. The doctor watches the spread of freezing outward from the probe tip.

When the entire target area is frozen and its cells killed, . along with a safety margin of surrounding tissue, the surgeon lets the probe defrost by trapping gas within it. The trapped gas warms to the temperature of the surrounding tissue in a couple of seconds, and the probe is removed. A single probe application freezes only a small area. After a few minutes the edges of the chilled area reach equilibrium with the surroundings and won't freeze. For large areas several probe applications are necessary. A freeze-thaw-freeze cycle is used most often because the second shot assures complete cell eradication better than one long application would.

One field that benefits dramatically from cryosurgery is gynecology. In the past, illnesses such as cervicitis and some precancerous lesions were treated with cauterization, a procedure that often resulted in corrosion of the smooth tissues of the cervix. This toughening of the tissue at the base of the uterus can endanger a pregnancy. And cauterization didn't always alleviate the problem permanently; lesions often returned to plague the patient.

With cryosurgery, the problem can often be treated in just one office visit, without significant pain. The cryoprobe can . deaden nerves in the surrounding area at the same time that it destroys the harmful tissue. "Not only is cryosurgery painless," says Donald Pasquale, "but it also freezes the damaged tissue in just three minutes and leaves no scar. The cervix is left as clean as a whistle." In addition, cryogenically removed lesions seldom return.

For hemorrhoids, too, cryosurgery beats the scalpel. As hundreds of thousands know only too well, the discomfort of hemorrhoid surgery rivals the torment of the inflammation itself. With cryosurgery, even serious hemorrhoids can be treated without an overnight stay in the hospital. The individuals treated in this manner can usually return to work in one to three days.

Ophthalmologists have found special benefits in cryosurgery. Using extremely small probes, they can freeze the lens of the eye, making it adhere to the cryoprobe the way a moist finger sticks to a cold metal post. This makes the lens much easier to remove during cataract surgery. The same technique works for removal of nonmagnetic foreign bodies from the eye. A properly placed cryoprobe can even help reattach a retina.

All of these applications may pale, however, compared to cryosurgery's potential as a treatment for certain forms of cancer. Skin cancers, because they are easy to spot and treat, are among the most curable. The problem is how to remove the cancerous cells. The cryosurgical method uses a special nozzle that shoots a spray of liquid nitrogen onto the patient's skin.

The doctor inserts a thermocouple into the tissue and sprays the tumorous area for 60 to 90 seconds. A few hours after freezing, the tumor blisters and reddens. A few days later a scab forms.

When the scab sloughs off, in about four weeks, the treated

area is completely healed.

"It's very easy for me," says Dr. Setrag A. Zacarian, a professor at Albany Medical College in New York State and dermatologist who pioneered the technique in the 1960s, "just to fill a thermos with liquid nitrogen, so that I can keep refilling the spray gun, and drop in on elderly patients, rather than having them come to the office. W,e've had a 95 percent cure rate with cryosurgery techniques."

Recently, cryosurgery has been extended to treatment of other, deeper forms of cancer. Particularly interesting results have come from prostate cancer tests, where the freezing process seems to unlock stymied immunological power in the patients' bodies, helping them re-establish control over the tumors.

A well-placed cryoprobe can deaden traumatized nerves in surrounding tissues without destroying them. At temperatures approaching minus 29 degrees C, some nerve cells may die, but others merely have their pain-transmitting function disrupted temporarily. For chronic pain, the probe is placed against the nerve for as long as two minutes. This desensitizes the nerve for several months. A briefer blast of cold can numb a nerve for a few weeks while healing takes place. Cryotechniques have fewer side effects than drugs do, and patients don't build up tolerance over time. The nerves return to normal without therapy once the effects of the frigid assault have worn off.

Notable success has already been achieved in relieving the victims of incapacitating migraines. By freezing three crucial brain arteries, a Canadian team in Victoria, British Columbia, found that they relieved migraines almost entirely in 53 of 106 patients who were studied for six months after treatment, and provided significant relief for 15 others. Similar selective application of intense cold could eliminate the pain accompanying other illnesses.

Cryoprobes are so effective at blocking pain that doctors in the United States and in England are experimenting with cryoanalgesia (substituting cold for drugs) in cases where traditional surgery is required. Chest surgery is notorious for the pain that accompanies the prying of ribs and stretching of skin. Previously, the drugs used to control this pain depressed breathing so much that fluid could collect in newly repaired lungs, increasing the chances for infection. Now at Colindale Hospital in London and at several branches of the University of California Hospital, patients have been treated with cold probes for pain following chest surgery. Cryoanalgesia patients were able to sit up and move about the day after their operations, and they left the hospital sooner and had fewer complications.

Yet not even cryosurgery's most fervent supporters consider it a panacea. However, the greatest benefit of cryosurgery, though, at least from the patient's point of view, is not its curative power. Existing treatments offer that. What is attractive about cryosurgery is that it treats individuals kindly, spares them pain and gets them back home quickly.

0 About the Author: Mike Edelhart is the author of Interferon: New Hope for Cancer and The Handbook of Earth Shelter Design.

ANURADHA IN SPACE A NEW PLANET? A FLORAL OFFERING

Gary Coleman, the cherubic star of the popular Diff'rent Strokes television series, recently underwent a successful second kidney transplant.

Coleman, 16, was born with a defective bladder, which damaged his right kidney in childhood. He was only five when he underwent his first transplant, and that kidney lasted almost 10 years. For the last year and a half, Coleman, whose

name remained on the country's computerized list of potential transplant recipients awaiting donor organs, had been on continuous ambulatory peritorneal dialysis, a treatment that required him to be hooked up to a bag four times a day to clean out his system.

Thanks to the successful second transplant, Coleman is back in Diff'rent Strokes, bringing laughter to millions around the world.

One of the most popUlar TV stars, Gary Coleman has featured in many American magazines.

This photo from Ebony, which ran a cover story on him, shows the young hero ofDiff'rent Strokes in his typically endearing pose.

"Anuradha," India's unique experiment to study high-energy cosmic rays, is all set for a ride aboard the U.S. space shuttle in April.

The only Asian experiment to be included in the European Space Agency-built Skylab aboard the shuttle, Anuradha was fabricated at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Bombay, by a team of Indian scientists. It is fitted with electrical and electronic assemblies designed by the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad and was assembled at the Indian Space Research Organization in Bangalore.

The 50-kilogram flight model, which was flown to the United States early last year, was subjected to a series of tests by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to ensure that the equipment could Withstand various stresses that would be experienced during the launch, flight and re-entry into earth's atmosphere of the space shuttle.

Professor Sukumar Biswas of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay, and principal investigator of the project, said that the Rs. 4-million experiment will help scientists better understand the phenomenon of cosmic rays, including their origin-which may in turn cast a new light on the origin of life on earth.

Cosmic rays, he said, "are very fast-moving atomic elements-from light hydrogen to heavy uranium-which bombard the earth and the solar system."

Explaining the significance of the experiment to understanding life on earth, -Biswas said, "Living things have evoJved from simple forms by genetic mutation through millions of years, and cosmic rays have played an important role in the mutation process and hence genetic evolution."

During its one week in space, Anuradha will measure the time of arrival and direction of the cosmic rays, by using an indigenously designed special detector. It will also provide clues about stars which generate cosmic rays. .

All Anuradha-related experiments in space will be conducted by mission specialist Dr. Don Lind, an expert in space physics. He received his Ph.D. in high-energy physics from the University of California and has worked as a space physicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

The data from Anuradha, Professor Biswas said, will be partly telemetered to the ground via a telecommunications satellite and partly recorded in Anuradha itself. After the completion of the mission, the instruments and data tapes will be returned to India for analysis.

merican astronomers have spotted what may be the first planet ever observed outside the solar system. Orbiting the star Van Biesbroeck 8 (named after a Belgium-born American astronomer who discovered it in 1961) in the Milky Way constellation, Ophiuchus, it is about five million million kilometers from earth.

The discovery was made by Donald McCarthy and Frank Low of the University of Arizona, and Ronald Probst of the National Optical Astronomy Observatories. They made the sightings of the planetlike body using a four-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona last May and a 2.3-meter telescope at the University of Arizona in June and July.

The object, according to the team, resembles Jupiter in appearance as well as in sUbstance, but is 30 to 80 times more massive. (Jupiter, the largest of nine planets circling the sun, is a whirling ball of liquid hydrogen with a colorful atmosphere that is mostly hydrogen and helium.)

The new planet, orbiting at a distance of about 960 million'

A young American, Joe English, recently brought an unusual New Year gift for the people of India from the people of his town, Rome, Georgia. The gift was 350 daylilies of rare varieties for the Raj Ghat samadhi in New Delhi.

Accepting the gift, K. Saddy, director (horticulture) of the Central Public Works Department and in charge of the upkeep

kilometers from the star Van Biesbroeck, has a surface temperature of about 1,080 degrees Celcius, making it hotter than any planet in the solar system. The sun's surface temperature is about 5,400 _degrees Celcius.

"The body identified as a planet is too dim and too cool to be a star," McCarthy said.

The properties of the newly discovered heavenly body, such as temperature, radius and energy output, the astronomers said in a report submitted to the Astrophysical Journal, "are consistent with a substellar mass companion, that is, a planet.

Both astrometric and astrophysical evidence support this interpretation."

However, McCarthy stressed, more studies must be made to determine the object's characteristics, such as its orbital period, its mass and its chemical composition before any firm conclusions are drawn about its exact nature.

If the heavenly body is indeed a planet, which future studies may confirm, it will climax a centuries-old search to find such a body. This would also provide the first direct evidence that planetary systems are not unique to our sun and may even be common in the universe.

of the hallowed samadhi of Mahatma .er in Kabisthalam village, 15 kilometers Gandhi, said: "We have daylilies in In,dia, from Kumbakonam in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. but only a few varieties, usually with "It was a memorable experience, and yellow or orange flowers. But these have the day I left India, I think, was my a wide range of rich colors-pink, mauve, saddest day," English noted. "My desire lavender and a red so dark you can barely distinguish it from black. Besides, they to return has been with me ever since."

Now, 15 years later, he's overjoyed to have much bigger flowers." be back. "It's like coming home again."

"I brought some 90 different varieties English thought of the flowers as a gift each with a different shade of color," saiq English, who is a horticulturist at the for the Indian people, because they are "probably the finest expression of love, Berry College in Rome. The best thing beauty and hope for a better future." about daylilies, he continued, is that they bloom round the year, even in the worst When English suggested to his colof summers when other flowers pine and lege, which has some of the best daylilies in the United States, that it present the wither away. Daylilies are a hardy plant flowers for Raj Ghat, he said, not only the that can admirably withstand the extremes of temperature. college authorities were thrilled but even English chose the Raj Ghat memorial "townsfolk stopped me in the streets and because, as he said, "It is a symbol of thanked me, saying it was a very good India that almost everybody visits," and gesture. " The idea of the gift came at a time when therefore the most appropriate place to share the "incredible beauty of the dayIndia was very much in the minds of the lilies."

American people, English said. The peoThe presentation of the flowers was for ple in Rome, as all over the United States, him the fulfillment of his love for India. were saddened over the assassination of "Even as a small child, I was fascinated Indira Gandhi and the Bhopal tragedy,

by India," English said. "Whenever I saw and the flowers are a small gesture of a book about India, I would buy and read their grief over the twin tragedies, and it, and longed to visit the country." The also an expression of their love for the desire was fulfilled in 1970 when he came people of India. "Small, simple gestures here as a Peace Corps volunteer. He like this, I think, is one great way of worked as an agriculture extension workextending the hand of friendship."

ecently, the U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded eight new research grants, totaling about Rs. 6.5 million, to Indian scientists for conducting studies in agriculture-related fields. Each project, which will be completed between three and five years, will have an American scientist collaborate with the Indian scientists.

The recipient of the largest grant-Rs. 1,348,020-is Dr. K. Pradhan of Haryana Agricultural University, Hissar. He will study the effects of dietary proteins and nutrient utilization in cattle and buffalo, the potential of buffalo to utilize poor quality feeds, and the formulation of least-cost balanced "rations for the two species.

The second highest grant-Rs. 1,1OO,OOO-has been awarded to Dr. NA Qureshi, head of the postgraduate department of zoology at Saifia College, Bhopal. He will study the prospects of fish culture in oxidation ponds, which have proven an inexpensive method for disposal of domestic sewage, as a possible cash crop for the urban farmer.

The other awardees are Dr. Ashwani Kumar, assistant professor in the department of botany, University of Rajasthan in Jaipur, to study the ultrastructural development of chloroplasts in the cellular photosynthetic process of tissue culture in plants; Dr. Ghanshyam C. Chaturvedi, president of the Farmer's friends Association at Bindu Sarovar in Gujarat, whose project involves control of rats; Dr. T.P. Singh, reader in the department of zoology, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, to study the effects of agricultural pesticide residues on fish in Indian inland waterways; Dr. Randhir Singh, professor of plant biochemistry at Haryana Agricultural University, who will study the prospects of breeding new and improved varieties of the chickpea, which fixes its own nitrogen; Dr. Raman Rai, senior scientist at the Rajendra Agricultural University, Pusa (Bihar), to study legume root nodulation and nonsymbiotic nitrogen fixation of maize and some millets of Bihar; and Dr. K.V. Devaraj, chief scientific officer at the University of Agricultural Sciences at Bangalore, to explore the possibility of utilizing brackish and estuary water for fish/prawn culture.

Last month the U.S. Department of Commerce organized an electronics fair, Electronics USA '85, in New Delhi, which provided a peep into the state of the art. The exhibition, sponsored with the support of India's Institution of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineers, was inaugurated by Dr. M.S. Sanjeevi Rao, chairman of the Electronics Commission of India. The display included computers and computer peripherals, microprocessor-based instrumentation systems, electronic testing/measuring instruments, telecommunications equipment, simulators and electronic biomedical apparatus.

In his inaugural address, Rao underscored the role of electronics in development, and spoke of the steps India has taken to bring in the latest technology. Edward R. Stumpf, Commercial Counselor at the American Embassy, New Delhi, said that India's new policy of liberalization has had a very favorable impact on the U.S. companies. This, he added, is evident from the fact that 65 American corporations are participating in this year's exhibition as against 33 at a similar show two years ago.

The firms represented at Electronics USA '85, which was earlier shown in Bombay and Bangalore, included such giants as Texas Instruments, Digital Equipment Corporation, Data Products, Wang Laboratories, Tektronix, Inc., Sperry Corporation and Harris Corporation.

For their small numbers, Indians living in the United States have done remarkably well.

Frequently one comes across Indians in America who bring fame to their adopted country as well as their mother country with their achievements. One such person is Dr. Oil Mohan Singh Bhatia.

Professor of geology at the Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, Dr. Bhatia was recently conferred a singular honor. He was listed in the 20th anniversary edition of the Directory of International Biography Volume XVIII, published in Cambridge,

England. He is one of 100,000 persons from 162 countries included in the directory. He is also listed in the Dictionaryof International Biography's International Men of Achievementand International Who's Who. An authority on oil and mineral exploration, Bhatia has been offered many important assignments by the United Nations. Last year he served as a technical consultant to the Government of Saudi Arabia.

Bhatia went to the United States more than two decades ago, and is now an American citizen.

Jesse Honey Mountain Guide

Hardesty Marratta set out from San Francisco early one June, with no money and little else, on his way across America.

He was prepared to hop freight trains, sleep on the ground, and cover fifty miles a day on foot. When he got to Oakland, it didn't take long to find a good position behind some reeds on the bank of a railroad line running east. He lay there in the sun, his head on his pack, chewing a sprig of grass, until he heard the sound of traveling thunder. Squinting through the vegetation, he saw a lone engine coming down the track. Where the diesel exhaust rose above the engine's black-and-yellow striped cabin (it looked like a huge motorized bee), the air wiggled like a bunch of springs, and six men in denim hung out from either side in the fashion of circus acrobats on a horse. Everything went by with a roar, and Hardesty put his head back on the knapsack, content to wait. After falling in and out of sleep, he heard the unmistakable rumble of a multiengined freight. Without even looking, he got himself ready; he didn't need to look, for when the eight engines came along the rails, pulling two hundred cars, the earth shook and the feeds sang.

Oil-covered water in a nearby ditch began to ripple and quiver. The first engine was as black as a gun, and had a yellow light glaring from the top as if it were the truth itself. Having just started out of the Oakland yards, it was beginning to pick up speed, straining to get going, and Hardesty could hear the sharp concussions of the couplers as they snapped into place to pull the hundreds of cars all the way down the line. Quite possibly, there's nothing as fine as a big freight train starting across country in early summer, Hardesty thought. That's when you learn that the tragedy of plants is that they have roots. The reeds and grasses on the hot mounds and in the ditches turned green with envy and begged to go along published in The New Yorker. Reprinted with permission.

Copyright Š 1983The New Yorker Magazine. Inc. Originally

(which is why they waved when the train mountains near Truckee [California], passed). The train itself promised a hun- while the train was moving slowly bedred thousand hot and lovely places filled tween hills of rock studded with straight with the noise of wind in the trees; easy pines, Hardesty paced the length of the summer in deep valleys; brown rivers; gondola car, still happy, though, after a black bays; and so much prairie that night on the boards, no longer elated. He alongside it infinity would look like a tick. had often jumped freights to go into the When Hardest~ saw that a clean new Sierras in rainless summer, but he had gondola car was coming, he slung his always had a home to which he could pack and began to run alongside the return. Now he didn't, and, as the train train. The occasional stones that had labored up the grade, he realized how rolled from the rail bed onto the black difficult his future was going to be.

At that very moment, he was thrown loam path paralleling it dug into his feet through his shoes. Every now and then he with irresistible force to the floor of the would glance to his right to see if the gondola car. In the fraction of a second gondola car was approaching, and when a before he lost consciousness, he regretted ladder moved into place' he put his right .that the boards seemed to be rising hand on it and felt it pull him along. By .toward his face; he could not imagine the time he had taken hold with his "left what was on his back; and he feared that hand, his legs were windmilling at a the car ahead had tumbled over and was prodigious rate. Then he moved his right in the midst of crushing him. Then he hand up a rung, jumped, and he was blacked out. riding ahead, free. All in all, it was many When he awakened, he was lying with times better a sensation than finding a his face to the sky. Blood had clotted hundred-dollar bill. over his cheeks, he felt sore, and he Vaulting the low side of the gondola discovered on the side of his head a gash car, he fell onto planks of brand-new pine as long as a caterpillar and at least as that smelled like a sunny forest in the distinct. Then he noticed a creature Sierras. The sides were high enough to squatting against the wall. Only by blinkkeep out most of the wind (but not all of ing, and clearing the blood from his eyes, it) and hide him from view. He might not could he see that it was a man-who be able to see railroad detectives stand- could not have been more than five feet ing by the side of the track, but then tall but looked about two feet high again they would not be able to see him. because of the powerful, muscle-bound And he would be able to see the fields, way in which he was sitting. He was the valleys, and the mountain ranges. He wearing a costume that, at first, Hardesty could stand up without fear of being could not fathom. Piece by piece, it was decapitated by bridges and tunnels, pace decipherable, but as a whole it was back and forth, run around in circles, breathtaking and unbelievable. His shoes whoop, dance, and leave his pack in a were big dollops of greasy black leather corner knowing that, no matter how that looked like pomaded cannonballs. much the train lurched, the pack would These Hardesty recognized as the most not roll off into a field, never to be seen expensive mountaineering boots with again. He wasn't hungry, it was lovely many years of wear and a bear or two weather, and he had the whole country worth of grease. To fall into a river with before him. Not surprisingly, he began to shoes like that meant certain death. And sing, and because no one in the world if they were to catch fire they would burn could hear him and he sang without for a month, even underwater. He wore zigzagged, edelweiss-design purple-andinhibition, he sang well.

The next morning, somewhere in the blue knee socks, cobalt-blue knickers,

rainbow suspenders, a violet shirt, and a pirate-style bandanna that was the same purple and blue as the knee socks but had a hypnotic pattern of red washed through it. His face was almost fully covered by a beard and perfectly round, rose-colored' sunglasses. Two fingers were missing from his right hand, three from the left; he carried a bright-blue day pack, and he wore a sling of mountain-climbing equipment that was dripping with silver carabiners, baubled with sparkling climbing nuts, clanging with pitons, and festooned with two dozen webbing runners of half a hundred fluorescent interwoven colors.

Slung over his shoulder was an orangeand-black climbing rope, and he was chewing a piece of beef jerky as big as a notebook.

"Sorry about that," he said between chaws on the beef. "I jumped the train from a bridge and I didn't see you.

Thanks."

"Thanks for what?" asked Hardesty.

"Cushioning my fall."

"What are you?"

"What am I? What do you mean by that?"

"What the hell are you? Am I dreaming you? You look like Rumpelstiltskin."

"Never heard of him. Does he climb in the Sierras?"

"No, he doesn't climb in the Sierras."

"I'm a climber. A professional. I'm on my way to the Wind Rivers, where I'm going to do the first solo of East Temple Spire. If I'm beartrap enough, I'll do it at night. Boy, that was some landing. I'm glad my rack and nuts are safe. That's a bad gash you've got. You oughta put some Nandiboon on that."

"What's Nandiboon?"

"Great stuff-Oil of Nandiboon. It heals anything real fast. A friend of mine brought it back from Nepal. Here .... " He reached into the blue pack and brought out a small flask, which he uncorked with his teeth. "I sort of feel responsible for you now."

"Wait a minute," said Hardesty as the oil was smeared over his wound.

"Don't worry, it's organic."

"What's your name?"

"Jesse Honey."

"What?"

"Jesse ... Honey. Honey is my last name. It's not my fault. It might have been worse. I might have been a girl, and they could have named me Bunny, or Bea, or who the hell knows what. What's your name?"

"My name is Hardesty Marratta.

What's in this stuff? It's beginning to sting."

"It does sting. But it heals real fast."

The pain from the Nandiboon Oil was on the rise, and Hardesty suspected that it would rise quite high. It did. Two or three minutes after it had been applied, the Nandiboon Oil was seething into his skin in thousands of boiling potholes.

Whatever Nandiboon Oil was, it was a good imitation of sulfuric acid and hydrogen peroxide. Hardesty rolled in agony.

"I'll get some water," screamed Jesse Honey. "There's a stream crossing the switchback. I'll catch you when you come this way up ahead." Hardesty didn't even hear him. But ten minutes later he saw Jesse Honey's hand begging for assistance over the edge of the gondola car, and he went to help. Jesse Honey threw a plastic jug of water into the train and grabbed Hardesty's extended arm so hard that he dislocated it. Hardesty collapsed again. Jesse Honey seized his arm (the wrong one) and proceeded to relocate it according to the principles of first aid.

But, since it was already located, he in fact dislocated it.

"Are you trying to kill me?" Hardesty shouted. "Because if you are, I wish you would just get it over with."

Jesse Honey seemed not to hear, and went about relocating both of Hardesty's arms. "I learned that on Mt. McKinley," he said, with evident satisfaction. Then he washed the Nandiboon Oil off Hardesty's face, and jumped from the train once again. When he returned, he was carrying a huge pile of brushwood.

"What's that for?"

"Gotta make a fire to boil water to cook the food and have tea," Jesse Honey said, lighting up the kindling.

"How can you make a fire on a wooden floor?" Hardesty asked, too late. The resinous floorboards had already caught fire, and flames were leaping in the wind.

Jesse Honey tried to stamp them out, but when his greasy boots began to ignite, he withdrew.

For half an hour, the wind carried the fire to front and rear. Lubricating oil, paint, the wooden floors and interiors of boxcars, dunnage, and a thousand miscellaneous cargoes all took flame, until finally half the train was blazing in sheets of fire. The train crew discovered it too late to stop it, and tried to make for the saddle of the mountains, where there was no wind. By the time they got there, it was too hot for Jesse and Hardesty to stay on, so they detrained and began walking east. As the sun set, they could see two red glows (the brighter being the conflagration on the train), and they could

hear periodic explosions marking the demise of tank cars laden with combustibles. According to Jesse Honey, it was all part of nature's way. "Trains," he said, "were never meant to be in the mountains."

For most of the night, they walked along the length of cool valleys on the crest of the Sierras, where they found only starlight and the deep tranquillity of mountains in early summer. The silence of the trees and the quiescence of the wind were nature's hope and disbelief that winter had passed. It was the time in the mountains when the wild terrain holds its breath before rejoicing, for fear of calling back the bright blue northerns and the snow.

A

first, Hardesty and Jesse did not speak as they traversed the blackened shafts of alpine defiles, on chalk-white paths, their eyes tracking the stars as they watched the rim of the mountains swallow them up. The air was springlike. It conveyed the same buoyant pleasure as walking into a gathering of little children who are arrayed like wild flowers in colorful hats and scarves. As always on the first day at altitude, it was easy to walk all night, and, besides, the air was so fresh and the streams so roiling and white that no living thing which knew joy or conscience could possibly have slept.

While they walked north-northeast, the moon came up behind them as creamy as pearl-perfectly round, benevolent, a flawless bright lantern. Jesse claimed that there was an excellent freight line in the direction that he insisted they follow, just a mile or two ahead. They had covered fifteen miles by the time the moon disappeared and the east brightened, and still there was no railroad. "There's a beautiful bridge right over the track," said Jesse, "made of logs and cables. I don't know who built it, and I don't know what for, but you can drop right onto the train with the greatest of ease."

"I don't understand," said Hardesty.

"Why do you have to fall from above every time you get on a freight? Why not just run alongside and catch a rung?"

Jesse looked at him wi,th hurt and annoyance. "I can't," he stated bitterly.

"I can't reach high enough."

Hardesty glanced at his companionwho was extremely short. "How tall are you, anyway?"

"What's the difference?"

"No difference. I'm just curious."

"Four-four and three-quarters [1.3 meters]. I was supposed to be six-three.

That's what the doctor said after he looked at my X-rays. My grandfather was six-six, my father six-eight, and my brothers are taller than that."

"What happened to you?"

Jesse bristled. "I don't know," he said, shaking his head. "For a man who stands four feet five inches tall-" "I thought you said four-four and three-quarters," interrupted Hardesty.

"Drop dead," Jesse snapped. "For a man who stands four feet five inches tall, this is a difficult world. When the newspapers describe someone who is fiveeight as being of below-average height, how do you think I feel? Girls won't even look at me. Most of them don't get the chance: they see right over my head. I wasn't allowed to join the Army, though the Navy was eager to have me-as a chimney sweep. I went to college, I'm an engineer, and the Navy wanted me to sweep their goddam chimneys. When big tall jerks strut around because they're proud of how tall they are, I just want to take a machine gun .... It doesn't matter.

I don't care anymore. What I need is a beautiful short woman in a little cabin near a low mountain range."

"I think there are places like that in the Black Forest," Hardesty said, "where, according to legend at least, you might find what you're looking for."

"N9 trolls," said Jesse. "I ¡was born American, and that cuts out trolls."

"No, no, no. I'm talking about pretty little blond blue-eyed women like you see on carved bottle stoppers."

"Not for me. I like California girls, slim and tall, the kind whose knees come up to my throat."

The next day, they covered forty miles in the full sun, talking about women, mountain climbing, freight trains, and politics. They were self-consciously silent whenever they crossed the tree line, because there they would wind through vast stands of dwarf pine. Hardesty said he thought that he might have broken a bone when he cushioned Jesse's landing.

"Don't you know?" asked Jesse.

"No, I don't. I never broke anything before. " "You never broke anything before!

That's crazy! I've broken nearly every bone in my body. Once, I forgot to anchor my rappel, and I broke sixteen bones at the same time. I was absentminded on the Grand and belayed myself with a reepschnur. (That's like using a shoelace.) Well, I took a forty-foot leader

fall on that reepschnur, and I think 'I They lashed the raft together with broke everything except my word, be- spare reepschnur cord, and pushed it cause, after the reepschnur snapped at from the rocks into the water, never to forty feet, I kept falling for another three see it again, for it sank like a heavy chain. hundred and fifty."

The sun was going down, but they had "I'm surprised you didn't die." decided to get wet anyway, and build a "I hit a lot of ledges." big fire on the other side of the lake, since They came to a crystal-blue lake almost there was plenty of Montana Balsam all as long and narrow as a river. From atop around. Jesse said it wouldn't burn, a group of boulders on the south side, which assured Hardesty of a comfortable they could see the railroad line, about a blaze by which to warm himself. mile across the water. Jesse said that they Wrapping their clothes in bundles to would have to swim, but that because the put on top of their knapsacks, they prelake was geothermal it was as warm as pared to set out across the water, knapbath water. Hardesty put his finger in, sacks balanced on their shoulders. In and disagreed. "Not on the edges!" Jesse theory, only the bottoms of the knapexclaimed, as if any fool would know sacks would get wet. But that theory that. "Geothermally warmed lakes are lasted only for the ten minutes that they hot only in the deeper portions. That's could swim fast. At the center of the lake, where all the heat exchange takes place. they sank deeper into the water, and Several tons of refrigerated thermal cur- everything got drenched. The water there rents activate an ion-intensive, BTU-rich was as cold as a mountain stream at midwave transfer beginning at the upwelling night on the last day of January. The colder parameters of the tollopsoid region of the they got, the faster Jesse talked, in what deepest central subset. Thus, the agitated sounded like a high-speed collision between a physics textbook and a politician. interference pattern of air-influenced temperature variations forces a haploid "I know this may sound like an exgrid upon the dimensional flows of sur- cuse," he said. "But tensor functions in face water trapped in an oscillating higher differential topology, as exemtoroidal belt that varies only with alkaloid . plified by application of the Gausssurfactant inversions of normal stability Bonnet Theorem to Todd Polynomials, caused by drought-induced desiccant con- indicate that cohometric axial rotation in centrations due to insufficient intra- nonadiabatic thermal upwelling can, by aqueous leaching." random inference derived from trans"Still," said Hardesty, "we might do lational equilibrium aggregates, array in better to walk around." obverse transitional order the thermo"Not a chance. The railroad is not even dynamic characteristics of a transactional tangential to the lake. It veers down from plasma undergoing negative entropy conthe northwest and veers up again to th'e versions." northeast, because they built it that way "Why don't you just shut up," said in the days when they needed to top off Hardesty. the boilers of steam engines. The lake is Jesse didn't open his mouth until the fifty miles long, and this is the central part frame he made to hold his clothes near of it. Besides, even if we walked to one their fire collapsed and his cobalt-blue end, we'd still have to cross a river, and knickers burned up. From that time forcrossing a river is a hell of a I~t more ward, he went bare below the waist excomplicated-believe me-than crossing cept for a New Guinea-style penis shield a lake. At least the lake stands still." that he fashioned from a discarded Dr. Apart from his explanation of why the Pepper [soft drink] can and hung from his lake was warmer in the middle than at its waist on a piece of reepschnur. He soon edges, what Jesse said sounded reason- took to extolling this form of dress as if he able. So they set to building a raft on were a Seventh Avenue designer introwhich to float their' clothes and belong- ducing a new line. "It's very comfortings as they swam. able," he said. "You should try it."

"That's hardwood," pronounced HarTwo hours after the fire burned out, a desty over a bunch of logs that Jesse was thundering mass of steel wheels and dragging toward the assembly point on the coughing diesels swung by the lakeshore, beach. (Jesse himself could barely be and Jesse and Hardesty found a comfortseen through the thicket of gray: he able flatcar to carry them toward Yellowlooked like a porcupine with a purple stone. Hardesty got up first, and Jesse ran skin disease.) "It won't float." by the side of the tracks, flagging danger"Hardwood? Ha! This is Montana Bal- ously, until Hardesty hoisted him aboard. sam. It's what they use in the interior of Hardesty was easily able to see him, dirigibles .... Of course it will float." because his buttocks shone in the light of

the moon. Twenty-four hours later, they "That's not true. I've seen bats in San jumped off the train rather than ride Francisco. " north into Montana and Canada, walked "Or east of Fresno." for a while, and then were stopped by After twenty minutes of groping along what they thought was the Yellowstone dark paths in a hissing subworld of hidRiver. den streams and mocking echoes, they Hardesty looked up at the sky, which came to what they sensed was a great seemed to be threatening rain. "Why chamber, for the sounds of their footsteps don't we build a shelter, and see what we fled away from them into the dark as if can do about crossing this river tomor- into the open air. They felt vast space row?" he said. "I think it's going to rain." above and to the sides, and no matter "Rain! You think that looks like rain?" which way they walked they found no Jesse asked. "Obviously, you never were walls but only level floor of rock and in the mountains for very long. Do you earth. They crossed small well-behaved know what infallibility is? I'll tell you. It's streams, and saw in them glowing chains me predicting the weather." He glanced of phosphorescent creatures. at the huge cumulonimbus clouds rolling How strange it was to see these things toward them from the north in a moun- that made their own light, blinking tainlike wall that shredded up the moon- by the hundreds of thousands in busy light. "That's going to pass in five silent codes. They seemed like an army of minutes. Tonight will be pure velvet. dedicated workers absorbed in preparaStretch out on the pine needles and tions for an unspecified journey. Batsleep." teries of little lights that racked up billions "I don't know," Hardesty said, wary of upon billions of permutations and comthe clouds. binations appeared to be driving unhindered toward some mysterious goal. How "Trust me."

Half an hour after they had fallen long had they been flashing deep in the asleep, a crack of thund~r popped them cave, how long would they continue, and up from the ground where they had been . what was the meaning of their language lying and turned them over like flapjacks. of random patterns in rich unworldly colors?

Lightning struck in machine-gun reports, felling trees. The river, which had already been a whipping, dashing flume, was now or hours, or perhaps days, so fast and white that it looked like a Hardesty and his guide wanstreak of lightning itself. And the rain dered on the plain of lighted that came down was not ordinary rain streams. Jesse completely forgot that falls in inoffensive drops. Hardesty and Jesse tried as best they could not to about the hermit's place. All they cared drown. "Follow me," Jesse said through a for was the color, the endless map of mouthful of water. calculating rivulets, and the routes of "What for?" tranquillity and silence that they followed "I know where there's shelter. I saw it into pitch-black emptiness. Like musical tones, the streams mixed and separated. on the way in."

They swam uphill for a few hundred At one poiht, the two men stood in the middle of a glowing plain so vast that they yards, until they got to the entrance wondered if in fact they were still alive. of a cave.

"I don't want to go in there," HarBut eventually they had to think about desty proclaimed, although he knew he returning to the surface. Hardesty sugwould go in. gested that they walk against the flow of "Why not? It's perfectly safe." the largest stream. That way, they would "I've always hated caves. I guess it's at least be going up. Soon the other because I'm Italian." streams in the luminescent net began to "Come on. I've been in this cave be- drop away, the one they followed grew fore, I think. If I remember correctly, a larger, the phosphorescence gradually hermit used to live here, and he left a disappeared, and they found themselves couple of nice feather beds, supplies, in, a huge chamber at the distant end of furniture, and lamps." which flashes of lightning were visible "Sure," Hardesty said, as darkness through an opening.

"This is perfect," Jesse said. "A nice swallowed them up. He was apprehensive. "Why do we have to go in so far?" soft floor, dry, and the exit is right over "To get to the hermit's place." there. Let's go to sleep."

"Don't you think," Hardesty asked, "What about bats?"

"There aren't any bats west of the "that we should light a match, to see what's in here?"

Platte."

E

"What could be in here? There's nothing in here."

"I don't want to go to sleep without knowing what's around me."

"That's stupid," Jesse yelled. "Hey! Whatever's in here, to hell with you! Go to hell! Kill us if you like! Arrragghh!"

For a small man, he had a miraculous voice. The challenges made Hardesty's ears ring.

"Even so," Hardesty said, searching in his pack for a box of matches, "I want to take a look."

He struck a match. At first, the whiteand-blue spark blinded them, but then the golden flame strengthened, and they looked up.

"I see," Hardesty said quietly. In lines as neat and well ordered as rows of cardinals seated at an ecumenical council were a hundred or more surprised, temporarily blinded, twelve-foot-high grizzly bears. Not knowing what to think of the two strangers who had come into their midst, they turned to each other for advice, pawed the air, and rotated their heads in confusion.

Hoping to keep away the bears, Hardesty lit as many matches as he could hold in his trembling fingers. The augmented light enabled him to see the bats.

The bats, not surprisingly, numbered in the hundreds of thousands, or in the millions. They clung to the roof of the cave in a solid mass several bats deep; they were the size of the broken umbrellas that one sees stuffed into trash cans on a windy day; and their ears and joints were hideously purple and pink. The bats began to move in a growing chain reaction; which prompted the bears to roar, showing white teeth as sharp as a splintered hayrack. Looking at the bears' teeth, Hardesty realized that Jim Bowie had stolen the design for his famous knife.

When the matches were exhausted, the bears converged and the bats began to fly. Smothered in brown fur and silky wings, Hardesty and Jesse realized that they were not being attacked but, rather, that they had started a panic. A torrent of bats and bears burst from the cave, like boiling mud spit from a volcano. Hardesty and Jesse were thrown out the door onto a pile of rocks illuminated by bolts and sheets of stroboscopic lightning.

After the animals were out, Jesse suggested that they go back into the cave to sleep.

"I suppose you don't think they'll come back, do you?"

"I would say the chances of that are only about fifty-fifty."

"You do what you want. I'm going to

sleep right here on this sharp rock."

The next morning, Hardesty awakened to see Jesse trying to make a fire by rubbing two pinecones together. When that failed, he tried to get a spark by hitting a rock with a stick. Finally, Hardesty found some more matches, and Jesse was then able to make a fire that didn't burn down the forest only because everything was so wet. They still had to cross the river.

"We should walk downriver to try to find a bridge," Hardesty suggested.

"Although the chances of the river getting narrower upstream are obviously greater, the altitude's going to increase, which probably means less settlement, whereas downriver there will likely be highways, easier terrain on the banks, and maybe a stretch that's calm enough for us to swim or shallow enough to wade."

"That shows what you know," Jess,e answered with considerable indignation, since he was the professional guide and they were in his mountains. "There isn't a bridge that we can use for two hundred

miles up or down this river. If you walk against the flow you'll find yourself in"a hell of rotten rock and mossy cliffs. To the south, it gets wider and stronger as tributaries join in. You'd have to go to Utah before you'd find a place still enough to wade."

"Then what do you propose?"

"Doing what J always do, what I've done a hundred times. in situations like this, what anyone who really knows the mountains would do almost automatically."

"What?"

"Build a catapult."

"To throw us across?" Hardesty asked.

"That's right."

"It's a quarter of a mile wide!"

"So?" "Let's say we could make a catapult that would do the job. All right. It throws us across. What do you think's going to happen then? J don't know what trajectory you plan, but we could be falling from very high. We'd be killed instantly."

"No we wouldn't," said Jesse.

"Why not?"

"You see how closely the trees are spaced on¡ the opposite bank? All we have to do is ride on shock pancakes, with extended reticular netting to catch in the trees."

"Shock pancakes."

"I'll show you." Jesse then- set immediately to building the catapult, the shock pancakes, reticular netting, leantos, and access paths. Although Hardesty didn't believe for a minute that anything would work, he was carried away by Jesse's confidence, his surety in constructing the various travesties, and the splendid, classical, fascinating idea of a machine that would enable them to fly.

For two weeks, they labored without sleep, eating little except the notebooksized pieces of jerked beef, tea, and the trout that they pulled from the river. At first, Jesse insisted on cooking the trout with body heat during the night (according to him, an old American Indian method). "There are better ways," said Hardesty, who then showed his guide how to plank fish.

At the center of a,nyw clearing, their machine rested on a foundation of earth, rock, and piles. They had felled many trees and stripped miles of vines with which to build a two-story frame supporting a hundred-foot tree that pivoted on a huge beam. A basket containing several tons of rock held the shorter end down until the long tree was winched close to the ground and fixed there as taut as a crossbow, The shock pancakes and reticulated nets were attached to the catapult head. The pancakes looked like wicker-weave lily pads ten feet thick and forty feet in diameter. Hardesty and Jesse were to be strapped onto them with guy wires of orange-and-black mountainclimbing rope. For further protection, they made big balloonlike suits of soft underbark that they wrapped around themselves over alternating layers of moss and puffballs. These "cushions," as Jesse called them, were so big and unwieldy that they had to be kept on top of the shock pancakes, or Jesse and Hardesty would never have been able to climb on, All in all, Hardesty was skeptical, and refused to commit himself to launch. But in the end he was so tired and hungry that, rather than walk to Utah, he decided to take his chances in a moss-andpuffball suit on a shock pancake thrown into the air by a giant catapult. Besides, the thing was insanely alluring.

At the appointed hour, they climbed the launching pad, put on their suits, and tied themselves in. Jesse had in hand a lanyard that would yank a wooden cotter pin from the trigger mechanism and send them flying, "You see that clump of green over there?" he asked, indicating a softlooking bed of young pine, "That's where we'll land. Our descent through the air will be slowed by the aerodynamically stable design of the nets and pancakes, The nets will grapple the trees, and the pancakes will take the force out of any direct impact. Needless to say, these suits are the ultimate protection.

"If you're frightened, don't be. I'm an engineer, and I've got this figured to the last decimal point. Are you ready?"

Mark Helprin is the author of the best-selling novel Winter's Tale. His other published works are A About the Author:

Dove of the East and Other Stories, Refiner's Fire and Ellis Island and Other Stories.

"Hold it just a second," said PIar~esty, "I've got to adjust this group of puffballs here. O.K. I'm ready now. Mind you, I think you're a lunatic, and I don't know why I'm trus ... t. ... " Jesse yanked the lanyard, and they were thrown with tremendous violence, not upward into the air but directly into the river, about fifty feet from shore.

They hit the water like an artillery shell, throwing a geyser of white foam a hundred feet high, and they, the pancakes, and the nets were quickly submerged deep in the rapids. Luckily for them, the whole package was righted in the neutral buoyancy, and when they surfaced they found themselves floating head up. Racing downstream, tied into their suits and onto the pancakes, and unable to move, they were conscious only because the freezing water had revived them after the first shock.

Hardesty started to struggle out of his suit.

"Don't!" Jesse screamed. "You'll drown.

At least this is sort of a boat."

"Go to hell!"

"Seriously!"

"Seriously?" Hardesty was frozen with accumulated anger, annoyance, disbelief, and disgust. "Seriously?"

"Take my advice or you'll be in for trouble."

"You don't think that riding at forty miles an hour down ice-cold rapids, on shock pancakes, in puffball suits, is trouble? You know what you are? I'll tell you. You're an incompetent. You don't do anything right."

"I can't help it if I was born short," Jesse screamed back over the roar of the waters. "Tall people aren't so great, just because they're a few feet higher."

Hardesty exploded. "It has nothing to do with short or tall!" Then he realized that they were about to float under a bridge that could not have been more than a mile or two from the catapult.

Little girls in rhubarb-colored glasses peered over the railings, fascinated by the strange boat that was passing below.

"What do you call that?" Hardesty asked.

"That's a toll bridge. I don't know about you, but I don't throw good money after bad."

Too exhausted to continue shouting over the sounds of the rapids, Hardesty slumped in his puffball suit, staring with tired eyes at scenery that rushed by as if seen from a train. Just as he was thinking that the situation wasn't so bad, because in a day or two they might hit calm water and be able to swim to the east bank, he saw that the river up ahead disappeared

completely. The water just stopped, and a shocking picture of blue sky and faraway clouds continued in its place.

"Ryerson Falls," said Jesse. "Threequarters of a mile high. I never went over them in a puffball suit."

Hardesty was torn between wanting to strangle Jesse and trying to gather his thoughts before death, so that upon quitting the earth he could cry out something beautiful and true, and not die, as his father had, with an amused smile.

He was able to find the intensity and beauty that he wanted, in the plunge itself. Physical forces in a complicated coalition of gravity, acceleration, and temperature were powerful and intense enough to satisfy him. It made sense.

Nothing was as comforting as the enduring purity of elemental forces, and returning to them could not mean defeat.

But he never thought that he would die in a bark suit, strapped to a shock pancake, next to an incompetent midget.

They went over a dizzying edge, and found themselves in the empty air. As they fell, they sometimes hit the water that was falling next to them and were tipped one way or another. The farther down Hardesty went, the greater his hope that, having come as far as he had, he would survive. In the last few feet, although he was going very fast, his hopes skyrocketed, because the water was so close.

The bottom of the falls was a blizzard of foam and bubbles in water so frothed and agitated that it was possible to breathe air a hundred feet below the surface. Their buoyant contraption was eventually hurled upward, and they popped up in the middle of the stream half a mile from the falls, greatly startling two fishermen-who weren't sure what they had seen but knew that it was as big as a car, and seemed to be driven by two backward-facing humanoid figures in strange uniforms.

They landed in a place that was full of geysers, mudholes, and pits of boiling sulfur. Without even looking at Jesse, Hardesty got out of his puffball suit, slung his pack over his shoulder, and set out toward the east.

"It's not a good idea to go in that direction," he heard Jesse calling out from behind. "You'd do best to follow me toward this outcrop. You have to have years of experience to walk on these crusts. Otherwise, you can go right through. It's more dangerous than walking on a minefield, and you've got no training. Look at all these sinkho-" That was the last of Jesse Honey. 0

The Robots Are Coming J' So are Beley's robots. His DC-2 BOB-an acronym for Brains on ~ android received acclaim when Board-is .9 meters tall, weighs lffl actor James Caan and some 22.5 kilograms, can turn on a ~'fj friends bought a model as a coin, talks, sings, cracks jokes present fou r years ago for a and quotes the daily stock marfriend. The sleek fiberglass deket totals.

Infrared sensors, vice can greet guests, disco at attuned to the frequency of huparties and serve drinks. Beley's man body heat, enable this techpromotional robots have starred nological prodigy to locate peoon television shows. And one ple in a room while avoiding :;:.,..has been arrested. tables, chairs and other objects.

Beley's teenage sons were More remarkable, BOB is a true homeward bound from a beach robot, with a sophisticated outing when they decided to "brain" consisting of two microhave some fun during rush hour processors with three megabytes in exclusive Beverly Hills, Hollyof memory. Androbot Inc. of wood. Unloading a DC-2 from Sunnyvale, California, testthe family van, the boys took the marketed this marvel of artificial robot for a stroll-which had a intelligence as a personal robot somewhat disrupting effect on designed for use in the home. traffic. Two policemen on duty "With the right software, BOB were . unamused, particularly can be programmed to help eduwhen the robot "fled" from them, cate children, teach languages, Chip the Robot on display at a computer show in Maryland. A screaming, "Help me, help me! protect a house at night and product of Robot World, a Baltimore firm, it can be programmed They're trying to take me apart." nudge you awake in the mornto provide entertainment and make presentations and deliveries.

The boys also fled and the offiing," explains Nina Stern, Andcers disconnected the robot's battery and hauled it off to jail. robot's public-relations consultant. "His memory can be progIt's unfortunate the arrest wasn't made by OPD2, a $14,000 rammedtofollowayoungsteraroundthe house, helping him learn robot sworn in as a member of the police department in the capitals of the states or reviewing homework for accuracy."

Orlando, Florida, in April 1983. Badge No. 92 is a 1.5-meter-tall, Moreover, when BOB "feels" the energy run low in its 87.8-kilogram robot that blinks when it talks and whirs when it humanoid body, it has the capability to excuse itself to get the walks. Clad in a brown hat, tan top and brown bottom-just like batteries charged. its fellow police officers-OPD2 has a plastic and metal body, Personal robots that talk, think and teach are no longer the exclusive domain of Hollywood make-believe and science red and blue flashing lights for eyes and a video screen on its chest. OPD2's chief role is that of an educational tool. And it fiction. An estimated 22,000 sophisticated robots are already in use worldwide, including 6,000 in the United States. But about gained considerable attention after being sworn in by the 98 percent of these are industrial robots-headless, formless, mayor, Bill Frederick, and Orlando police chief William Koleszar, automated androids that work on American, Japanese and when it scooted out of the Orlando city-council chambers.

European assembly lines. They operate various kinds of A different tune accompanied the appearance of Robot machinery; the walking, talking robot is strictly in the minority.

Redford at Maryland's Anne Arundel Community College. First, "The personal robot is in the infancy stage. It's at the same the mobile machine "marched" in the academic procession point the home computer was 10 years ago," emphasizes with the 551 members of the graduating class. Then, Robot Gene Beley, president of Southern California's Android Redford delivered the commencement address. The unique Amusement Company. "I expect the same thing will happen idea of a robot delivering such a speech was the brainstorm of Dean Anthony Pappas, who wanted to call attention to the with home robots as with home computers. Technology college's new unit in computer sciences and technology. eventually will provide a reasonably priced, functioning home Called a demonstration android, Robot Redford is owned by robot that'll be capable of performing all kinds of wonderful Bill Bakaleinikoff, whose firm, Superior Robotics of America, things. Right now, however, the industry is in what I call the entertainment stage." nets about $1,200 a day from its appearances at state fairs and trade shows. A sort of mechanical Pied Piper, it attracts crowds by singing, dancing and flirting with the ladies.

This article has been republished through the courtesy of Halsey Publishing Company. publishers of Delta

I

SKY Magazine

Copyright

Š

1983 Walter

Roessing.

(Text continued on page 45)

With the office robot establishing itself, the home robot can't be far behind. It's being taught to scrub toilets, wash windows, serve drinks ....

Wadhwani's Merlin "Everyone claimed they were developing the best robot," says Romesh Wadhwani, president of American Robot Corporation in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

"And we were saying it, too. The question was, how could we prove it? I decided to sell in Japan. The other robot companies were afraid to do it."

Robots are to Japan what coals are to Newcastle. Japan uses robots to make robots.

For every industrial robot on the job in the United States, Japan has five. Nearly 250 Japanese companies compete in the robot business. Yet the American robot market is potentially the world's largest, and anybody who can sell to the Japanese obviously can command serious attention in the United States, where some 50 companies are struggling to supply industrial robots.

Or so Wadhwani -thought in 1982 when he flew off to Japan-and actually sold five robots, worth $250,000 in all, to Sony Corporation and others. He sold them even though American Robot's Merlin costs more

than twice as much as its indigenous counterparts in Japan. Wadhwani also managed to convince General Motors, Ford, Honeywell and other American companies to buy a total of 47 robots. For what was, for all practical purposes, a startup year, that was a great beginning.

The question, of course, is how American Robot has successfully competed in a field that includes such larger robot makers as Cincinnati Milacron and Unimation, owned by Westinghouse. A potential business partnerJohn Matrone, manager of Fairchild Camera & Instrument's computer-aided automation group-supplies part of the answer: It is, Matrone says, the robot's superior combination of precision, speed, reach and payload capacity. American Robot's sales brochures show the robot putting a needle seven onethousandths of an inch wide through another needle's eye nine one-thousandths of an inch Right: Romesh Wadhwani and Merlin. Top: Two Merlin Intelligent Robots at work testing and assembling computer disks.

, THE ROBOTS ARE COMING continued

The age of the home robot hasn't quite arrived, but in the not-too-distant future, robots may scrub toilets, wash windows, mow the lawn, clean the oven and fetch your slippers. Some major obstacles must be overcome, however, before such a home android becomes a reality.

Inventors will have to equip robots with a vision system that discerns the relative size, shape and distances of objects. It's imperative that a pet android be able to distinguish between a glass picture window in the living room and the concrete walls.

A Japanese firm claims to have developed a new robot that can perceive objects with two "movable eyes" made of 300,000 optical fibers which enable it to differentiate shapes and sizes through "image-recognition technology." Its proven effectiveness can't be determined, however, until the robot is installed in an Osaka assembly plant.

Another serious obstacle facing the perfection of personal robots is the design of the typical home itself. Robots won't be able to perform many household chores until they can be programmed to climb stairs, negotiate sharp corners and function in rooms of different sizes. Developing sensitive touch is another significant challenge. To be effective, robots must be able to grip a glass without shattering it, or wash a window without breaking it.

Some of the true robots that have recently been introduced do feature on-board computers and sensing capabilities that enable them to talk, move, determine distances, sense light, grip objects and teach.

Hero I made an auspicious debut in 1982. Looking something like R2-D2 of Star Wars fame, it was unveilej before television cameras and a real-life U.S. senator. Although it-the robot, not the senator-can, it is reputed, speak any language, the one-armed device used a simulated brand of English to tell a television crew: "Please turn off light. It hurts my eyes."

A product of the Heath Company of Benton Harbor, Michigan, the robot has been designed as a training system for industry and schools. Hero I is a self-contained, electromech'rnical android that can be programmed to pick up small objects, travel over predetermined courses and repeat specific

wide without touching the sides. It can do that with a payload of about 2.5 kilograms.

No one looking at American Robot in 1982 could have predicted its coups. That's when Wadhwani, 37, born in India, joined the two-year-old firm, then generally considered to be poorly managed, directionless and having a ho-hum product. The company had almostno cash and only five employees. In an effort to retrieve its investment, Venrock Associates, the Rockefeller family's venture fund, which had financed the firm, hired Wadhwani.

He had already piled up interesting credentials. After being graduated in 1972 from Carnegie-Mellon with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, he founded Compuguard, a building-managementsystems company. He sold out to BBC Brown, Boveri & Cie. of Switzerland in 1979 but worked there until 1981,when he left because of disagreements over Compuguard's direction. From Compuguard, which was only marginally profitable, Wadhwanilearned two lessons: "First, never beundercapitalized.Second, bring in top man-

functions on a predetermined schedule.

Introduced in September 1983, the RB5X Intelligent Robot has caused quite.a stir among students, educators, business people and the general public. As the first general-purpose microbot designed especially for home experimentation and educational purposes, the RB5X contains its own microprocessor-its own computer on a chip. So it is completely programmable. It's also equipped with its own memory, programs, sonar and tactile sensors. The RB5X actually learns from its own experience. And hardware and electronics can be altered or added at the discretion of the user.

"Born" in early 1983, ComRo TOT is a fully programmable, functioning robot that can push a baby in a stroller, sweep carpets and do light household chores. At parties, it serves drinks and snacks. It also has a compact television-and_-a'cassette deck to entertain the guests. Its makers, Comro Inc. of New York City, are now exploring the possible medical benefits of robotics. Robots could, for example, perhaps be made the extensions of handicapped children and adults.

Computer students at the University of Florida in Gainesville have been teaching a robot how to pour refreshments without spilling, write its name in big block letters and stack colorful blocks in some kind of order.

Superior Robotics is working on a robot security guard. Says Bakaleinikoff, "I've already completed the prototype. My security guard would confront an intruder with flashing eyes and blaring diesel horns while recording evidence on its .35-millimeter camera and voice analyzer. It would do all that-after dialing the police."

Bakaleinikoff jokes, "I can see the day coming when robots will lick green stamps without getting sick, remove hot pizzas from ovens without gloves and work as bartenders in tough neighborhoods,' , Seriously, though, some scientists predict that a time will come when standardized robots will be as commonplace in the home as television sets are today (seepictureson next page).

0

agement early.That has madeallthe difference at American Robot."

Wadhwani hired engineers from such firms as Data General and Digital Equipment Corporation to design a multipurpose robot.

Japanesecompanies,and manyl).S. manufacturers as well, have typically developed robots for specific tasks. Merlin can handle up to 70 percent of all robot applications, from arc welding to electronics assembly. Wadhwani arranged over $9 million in new financing so that, all told, venture capitalists now own 60 percent of the company. That left American Robot-whose sales are now only $3.5 million a year-with $5 million in cash and no debt. "When large companies want to buy robots from us, they want to know we'll be around for a while," Wadhwani says of his relatively enormous pile of cash. "Besides, the best time to raise venture capital is when you don't need it." The company remains privately held, and there are no plans to take it public anytimesoon. American Robot's prospects are bright enough, clearly,that it doesn't needto lay off any risk on the public.

Wadhwani intends to expand Merlin's market beyond primary industrial users through licensing agreements and contracts with original-equipment manufacturers who will buy in bulk.

Britain's RediffusionSimulation,for example, has licensed Merlin in the United Kingdom and agreed to buy or build 160 robotsthrough 1986 and at least twice that many over the succeeding six years. Fairchild Camera & Instrument has an agreement under consideration to integrate the Merlin with its own test equipment.

Says Laura Conigliaro, an analyst with Prudential-BacheSecurities, "It's a'brutalbusiness. American Robot is a pleasant surprise, and one of the few private companies that should be watched, but it has got to stand the test of time." Successfully withstanding the test by the Japanese, however, has gone a long way toward improving American Robot's 0 chances.

About the Author: John A. Byrne is a staff writer for Forbes magazine.

The Robots Are Coming continued

Left: Yik San Kwoh, the inventor of this robotic arm being perfected at Memorial Medical Center in Long Beach, California, calls it a "surgeon's helper." When the arm is hooked up to a Computerized Tomographic Scanner-a machine that provides high-resolution images of the tissues in the brain's interior-its computer can guide a surgical probe to a precise target point within the brain. Kwoh hopes the arm will offer a safer, cheaper way of carrying out such common neurosurgical procedures as taking biopsies of brain tumors, draining abscesses and depositing radioactive isotopes directly into tumors.

Right, top: Although great strides have been made in the field of robotics in the last two decades, one of the fundamental problems involves building a "hand" that even remotely approximates the dexterity of the human hand-how to provide a robot's hand with enough tactile sense to grasp objects, like an egg, without crushing them.

Right, center: Available off the shelf or as build-ityourself kits in the United States, personal r.obots, like the three shown here, talk, sing and serve drinks.

In the not-too-distant future, robots may also mow lawns and wash dishes.

Right, bottom: Part of a newly invented motion system which allows a robot to move with ease in any direction, this microcomputer -controlled robotic arm will help handicapped people to maneuver their motorized wheelchairs without any problem.

Right: The diagram shows a computer-aided design of a robotic arm being developed at Stanford University.

Right, center: Far more efficient than a human worker, this tireless industrial robot delivers parts to work stations in one of the most automated factories in the United States-an Apple Computer assembly plant in California.

Right, bottom: Robots take on work considered too hazardous for humans-for example, die-casting or handling nuclear waste.

Here, a spot-welding robot attaches the bodies of cars at the Chrysler plant.

Some Shapes!

A cluster of geometric star forms is arrayed in colors as rubber socket connectors. He holds up a dodecahedron with its prodigal yet rational as nature itself. On a winter day, in an 12 pentagonal faces outlined by the sticks of such a toy and artist's bare studio lit through large wIndows by sunlight and discusses a sculpture that he is developing now: "I wondered reflections from the snow, the star cluster revolves slowly, and what would happen if you intersected dodecahedron." That is, all the seasons of the year seem on parade. Yellows, blues and he wondered what would happen if stick-figure dodecahedra greens are like midsummer foliage. But soon that form appears were somehow meshed together. "So I had Hal do that." to vanish, while a new one-similar yet utterly transformedHal-Harald Robinson-is one of the merobers.of Bradflares up inoranges"tCoos-attdi>obr6wns. Atfd~then sees"leY's loose-knit workshop in Massachusetts. This group includes lavenders, purples and crimsons.

Louis Rosenblum, a mathematician who calculates the exact Sculptures such as this by Morton C. Bradley, Jr., are based sizes and angles for sculpture parts; Joseph Parker, who with on strict mathematical shapes and color schemes. The sculp-, Robinson generally constructs the parts and preliminary tures are exciting yet hypnotic. They are orderly, yet one "sketches"; and Linda Priest, who usually makes the finished wonders how. And in the strangest transmutation of all, the pieces. As the master designer, Bradley communicates what he mathematical relationships of color and form can grow into wants to the rest of the workers, rarely using paper and never meaningful configurations: some of the sculptures are nick- measured drawings. Rather, he almost always talks face-to-face named trees, Machiavellian knots and angel wings. and, as he says with a smile, "I wave my arms."

Bradley's sculptures are based on geometries of the In the case of intersecting dodecahedra, Bradley waved his so-called "Platonic solids"-the only convex solids with regular arms meaningfully and Harald Robinson understood and made faces. These are the tetrahedron with four triangular faces, the a rough sketch. Dodecahedra with their 12 pentagonal faces cube with six square faces, the octahedron with eight triangular . and icosahedra with their 20 triangular faces have a way of faces, the dodecahedron with 12 pentagonal faces and the going together. It is no accident that 12 x 5 = 20 x 3 = 60, one icosahedron with 20 triangular faces. Their geometries are of those innumerable relationships that Bradley calls "neat." If amazingly fertile, and their origins go back centuries. you evenly shave off the 20 corners of a solid dodecahedron, As perfect building blocks, Plato proposed the five regular you get an icosahedron. These two regular solids are called solids-hence they are called the Platonic solids. Plato estab- duals and are forever metamorphosing into one another. But as Iished their place in history, describing them in Timaeus. The they do, they make patterns of fives and threes-pentagons and rich cosmology of shapes that emerge from the elemental triangles. In Robinson's intersections of dodecahedra, Bradley Platonic solids is astonishing. was startled to see incipient squares.

At the heart of this geometry is the so-called "golden ratio," "I noticed that three sides of a square started recurring, and approximately 1.618 to 1. Many consider this the most aesthetic I wondered what would happen if I added a fourth." On a proportion and prefer the golden rectangle, in which the ratio stick-form dodecahedron, he built stick-form squares pointing of the length to the width is about 1.618 to 1, above all others. directly toward the center from each of the edges. He produced To explore the mathematics of the golden ratio, take a line a complex form that reveals a multiplicity of order.

1.618 meters long and divide it into two parts-one 1 meter long But Bradley wasn't content. One midnight' he wondered and one .618 meter long. The ratio of the whole line to the long what would happen if he tried¡ the same sort of thing with a part-1.618 to 1, the golden ratio-is about the same as the stick-form icosahedron. Placing stick squares inside a stick ratio of the long part to the short part-1 to .618. (Any hand icosahedron yielded a regular kaleidoscope of shapes. calculator will verify that 1.618/1 is roughly 11.618.)

To color his creations, Bradley uses a scheme devised by If you take a pentagon and draw lines connecting its five Albert Munsell, a 19th-century American artist who painted points, the five-pointed star that is formed has golden ratios canvases such as The Ascension of Elijah and was obsessed with where the lines cross. You also get golden triangles-the ratio describing color scientifically. Bradley developed a color globe of either of the two long sides to the short side equals the golden from Munsell's scheme. The hues-red, orange, yellow, green, ratio. When you combine Platonic solids into composite blue, purple-circle the equator. Toward the north they lighten structures, as Bradley does, golden rectangles, triangles and to a white; toward the south they darken to black. ratios appear everywhere.

Bradley used the globe to create three sets of colors. If you There are four more inhabitants of the world of perfect fit a dodecahedron around the globe, the 12 colors touched by solids. Much as you extend the lines of a pentagon to form a its faces form one set. The 20 colors that touch the faces of an five-sided star, you can extend the planes of a 12-faced icosahedron form another set. If you snap together a stick-form dodecahedron and a 20-faced icosahedron to obtain three- dodecahedron and a stick-form icosahedron, they intersect at dimensional starlike forms. In fact, the dodecahedron has three 30 points. If you fit this structure around a color globe, the regular stellations: the small stellated dodecahedron, the great places where these points touch give a set of 30 colors. dodecahedron and the great stellated dodecahedron. The Separately or combined, all the color sets-of 12, 20 and icosahedron has many stellations but only one is regular, the 30-progress evenly around the rainbow of hues and shade great icosahedron. These four stellations together with the uniformly from light to dark. original five Platonic solids are the only regular polyhedra"The synthesis of color space and geometrical space is the solids with flat surfaces-that exist. single most important idea in my sculpture," says Bradley.

One way Bradley discovers new combinations of golden Bradley is also a well-known restorer of paintings, many of ratios, triangles, pentagons and stellations for his sculptures is which could hardly be further from the spirit of his own work. 0 by playing with a children's toy consisting of plastic sticks and

one

About the Author: Jonathan Schiefer, a senior editor of Technology Review, has degrees in ancient Greek, mathematics and,architecture.