Why Are We So Strange?

We three have chattered away for a year on things that strike our fancies (some of them more fanciful than others). Evidently you share these interests, and we're glad for that. Maybe we're not so strange after all.

When Steve and Reid traded a couple early photos last week, I thought it might be fun to ask them how they came to love the things they do. I didn't want you to miss out on the visual aids, so I asked them to share those photos too: Young Men With Big Hair.

FROM STEVE: I am so weird I never thought about it--just followed my interests--until Betsy Huntington told me I was eccentric in my late twenties. I had always patterned myself after the great naturalist- adventurers from the Victorians to Will Beebe and Roy Chapman Andrews, and was puzzled that I couldn't get around the world as easily. Once after I mused on this she stared at me and said in her best patrician drawl; " Stephen-- don't you understand that they were all richer than GAWD?"

Until that moment it had never occurred to me.

Parenthetically; later, I met and befriended the late great Jesuit-explorer- naturalist- hunter Anderson Bakewell-- I should post on HIM some time, maybe including a pic of him in a fringed buckskin jacket with a woodland bison and his Rigby .416. Priests from orders like the Jesuits are supposed to take vows of poverty, but that didn't stop his using his Holland and Holland .470 double rifle that he had since he was a kid in trade to build a whole church in the Northwest Territories. He-- who had known the likes of Beebe and Andrews and Arthur Vernay-- was also richer than "Gawd".

Or as Betsy's friend Joan said: "A Bakewell? They are rahther GRAND. I
believe they own Missouri".

His great great- something aunt Lucy married Audubon.

STEVE ON HAIR: I never did anything but cut it less than I do now-- was wearing it like that since my teens, slightly pre- Doors, so Morrison was no model. But at the High School graduation party last Saturday, a now adult and married young Navajo who was drinking with us (local custom: parents & relatives stand around the bed of a pickup in the parking lot drinking beer and waving at the cruising cops from time to time)said: "When we were little kids-- when I was four-- [Ouch!] we used to call you "Little House on the Prairie". [ie, Michael Landon.]

Quips George Gonzalez the one- limbed mechanic: "Now he looks more like Albert Einstein!"

FROM REID: I knew when I was eight years old. Just before I started Third Grade, my father took a job as a salesman for a pharmaceutical company and we moved from my mother's home town of Jonesboro, AR to Louisville, KY. We lived in a suburb called Fern Creek which then was little more than a rural cross-roads. There were no children near my age living within walking distance of my house. After school and on weekends, I had no one to play with. My sister was six years younger so she couldn't really take that role.

I had lots of time on my own. I spent part of that with my dog, roaming the farm fields and wood-lots that surrounded our house. For most of the rest of it, I read. I had always enjoyed reading, so I read and read and read some more. My parents encouraged this, buying books and taking me to the library. The librarian wouldn't allow me to check out books that weren't from the children's section, and I had a proud moment when my mother told her I could check out any book in the library.

There was an illustrated children's version of The Iliad (librarian didn't want me to have it) that I checked out and rechecked for several months. I subscribed to the American Heritage Junior Library. I read most of the "All About" series. I read many of the "We Were There" historical novels. I read the Roy Chapman Andrews juveniles. I started reading science fiction: Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, and the Tom Corbett series. Other boys made plastic model airplanes and cars. I put together and painted plastic models of songbirds - do they still have those?

Finally my folks bought me "The Wonderful World of Archaeology" by Ronald Jessup. I was instantly hooked. The book is beautifully illustrated and I would moon over it for hours, trying to trace or copy pictures of artifacts and ruins. Near the end of the book, there is an illustration of a cross-section of a typical museum, showing the offices and research labs "behind" the exhibits. I picked out where my office was going to be.

I was on a trajectory to be different from my classmates because I rarely saw them socially outside of school. When I started talking at length about subjects that they knew or cared little about, it increased the effect. Back then when little boys were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up, they'd say a fireman, or a jet pilot, or an astronaut (popular in those early days of the space program). When I was asked, I said I was going to be an archaeologist. It always raised eyebrows.

My parents thought I would come to my senses, but I never did. It's right there as my career ambition in the write-up next to my senior picture in my high school annual.

REID ON HAIR: Like Steve, mine was just like it is now, just not cut as short. The part is in the same place and everything. You have to remember that of course long hair was fashionable, and up to the time period of the photo I was never able to have it. I had four years of a conservative private high school with a short hair rule, four years of ROTC drill at Tulane where I had to keep it short, and several months of active duty in the Army. As soon as I got out of the service, I grew it long and kept it that way for a couple of years. Then I decided it was too much bother, cut it off, and have kept it short since.

FROM MATT: I remember climbing up to the top of my dresser with the family's illustrated dictionary. This would be me, still in the single digits. I spent "hours" up there, according to Mom, perched with the book in my lap and doubtless thumbing up words like "bosom" and "posterior." I don't think I've been without a dictionary since, which can in no way explain my terrible speling.

Like all Army Brats, we moved around. I spent a pivotal pre-teen segment of my youth in Fairfax County, Virginia, while Dad worked at the Pentagon. Behind our house (then, but certainly not NOW) stood a wooded stretch just large enough to get lost in---which friends and I did at every opportunity. Ditto into the labyrinth of neighborhood storm drains, so cold in summertime and full of curious graffiti (our latter day pictographs?). I read recently via Richard Louv (author of Last Child in The Woods) that since my birth in 1970, the area within which American children now "explore" outside the home has shrunk 90%.

I aspired back then to entomology, a rare notion even in my B-list circle of friends. The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History had (still has, maybe) an Insect Zoo that became my office on regular weekend trips. Brother Philip (now a surgeon) spent his time at the Air and Space Museum, memorizing flight data.

One keen memory of my days at the bug zoo was being turned down for a summer job; doing something, presumably, with the collection, but probably too young for it at twelve. I cried. Out loud. I was inconsolable. It must have been an embarrassing moment for everyone there. But on the bright side, a kind curator sent me home with a box full of freshly dead stick insects----really big, nasty, tropical ones that were just starting to smell a bit. I kept them in the family fridge until one day they disappeared.

A couple years later, in the Republic of Panama, I picked up an orphaned screech owl [Otus asio choliba] and dropped the dream of being a bug doctor almost simultaneously. A necessary string of introductions---to vets and rehabbers---plugged me into a pipeline of future birds and to delusions of a life in falconry that have never fully dissipated. Boy, interrupted.

MATT ON HAIR: I'll let Mom take this one, "You had GORGEOUS hair. I mean, look at it. Michael Landon would flip over in envy. Probably still do. It is a Mullenix gene and you inherited heaps of it. It is amazing that Dad is 70 and still has a head full. Some day you will be so glad to have hair 'at your age' even though it seems a nuisance now I guess."

Did you get all that? The sense of loss and the rest of it? Sigh...

Here I am at 14, c.1984. I call this pic: "How Mom Remembers My Hair"