When I was in about the fifth grade, for various reasons, my mother went back to work. She got a job drafting for Caltech Geology. During vacations I haunted her office, playing with the drafting tools, following around the geologists, pestering the staff, and generally making a nuisance of myself.
It was a great place. Down in the basement they had aquariums that might have had something to do with geology, with fluorescent nudibranches that fascinated me. The geologists were a merry lot who scattered their footprints all over the geology. One professor had returned from Greenland, where, at considerable expense, effort, and danger, he had succeeded in extracting cores of ancient ice from crevasses deep inside glaciers. From these cores, he intended to analyze the content of the atmosphere long in the earth's past. The best laid plans of lice and men: the precious samples that he was working on were temporarily placed in a special refrigerator in his office, where they stayed until one hapless graduate student wandered in looking for some ice for his coke. Definitely not a good career move for the student, although I understand he later did find gainful employment toting baggage at LAX.
Andy Ingersoll, who had the whole field of interplanetary geology to himself, took me up to the observatory to look through the telescopes. All of the geologists were nice to me (probably because I didn't want any ice in my soft drinks), but Juri van de Wode was in a special class.
Juri came to Caltech by way of the Royal Dutch Air Force. He loved flying the prop planes, with his silk scarf fluttering behind him, and he loved telling stories about the good old days. The good old days before he was married, when his beloved lived in a pleasant house near the base. Juri drew pictures as he told stories, the pleasant house, a pine on each side. One day he was flying over the neighborhood, so he decided to salute her. He buzzed the house, dropping like a dive bomber until he almost hit the chimney before he pulled up. He returned to base very pleased with the impression he must have made on her.
That evening he was surprised by the glacial expressions on her parents' faces. He sat down in the living room with her father, who was puffing on his pipe. Her father asked, "Juri, did you fly today?”
"Yes, I did." For some reason Juri felt that it was not yet time to boast about his buzzing skills.
Puff puff. Silence. Pause. Glares. "Juri, were you flying at around 4:15 this afternoon?”
"Yes, I was.”
Puff puff. Silence. Pause. Glares. "Juri, did you fly over our house?”
"Yes, I did.” Juri was definitely becoming uncomfortable. It turned out that his beloved's mother had just washed a pile of her heirloom plates, and had been carrying them to return to their cupboard when Juri dropped by. She was so surprised that she dropped the whole pile, shattering every one. Juri laughed uproariously when he told me this story, but after all, Caltech is a long way from the Netherlands, twenty years had passed, and they got married anyway.
Another one of his proudest moments was when they were on maneuvers, and had set up a special officers' latrine in the woods. As he flew by, Juri took some wonderful photographs of the colonels and generals doing their business. Oh yes, and Juri was also the Dutch Air Force's first Mach buster. That too, but he didn't take so much pleasure in telling the story, because it was in a jet, and when you pilot a jet, your silk scarf doesn't flutter in the wind.
What fun is flying if your silk scarf doesn't flutter in the wind? Ask Snoopy: no fun at all! No more silk scarves, no fun. Juri left the Air Force and emigrated to US, where he became the top astronomical photographer in the world. He was the best part of my vacations. One spring vacation I helped develop photos of moon which had been taken by a space probe; those were the best photos of the moon that existed at that time.
One day Juri asked, "Did I ever tell you the story of the little sergeant?” No, he hadn't. You see, one day, a little sergeant was transferred to their base. Ok, that happens all the time. Juri told me how he reported in, carrying his duffle bag over one shoulder. He was a quiet man, short, dark, never talked much. For some reason, another sergeant took a strong dislike to him. For convenience, we will call the mean sergeant Leo, and the meek sergeant Vincent. Leo picked on Vincent mercilessly. Even though they were the same rank, Leo ordered Vincent around as if he were a raw recruit. Vincent bore it meekly, without a word. In Leo's eyes, Vincent never did anything right, and Leo always jumped on his back. Vincent bore this meekly for several months. Finally one day Leo yelled at him and insulted him in front of everybody. Vincent said nothing, but returned to his quarters.
Twenty minutes later, a large black limousine flying the Queen's insignia drove into the base. Everybody snapped to attention. Out stepped the largest, meanest, nastiest officer anybody had ever seen in the Dutch armed forces. In a voice like a cannon, the officer called for Leo, and as Leo stood trembling before him, proceeded to scream and yell at him with such eloquence and vehemence that Juri learned many new words. After a quarter of an hour of this, the officer ordered Leo to pack his bag as quickly as he possibly could. Leo was roughly pushed into the Queen's limousine, and driven away. The word was that he spent the rest of his military career in the most remote, most uncomfortable base the Dutch Air Force had in some miserable corner of Indonesia.
That was when they found out that Vincent was the one and only Dutch survivor of the Bataan death march. After the war when he was released from Japanese prisons and returned to the Netherlands, the Queen personally awarded him Holland's highest military decoration. With the decoration came a special privilege: the recipient was allowed to phone the Queen directly at any time, with any request. Juri picked up the phone in his office and gleefully imitated the conversation: "Your Majesty, Leo keeps picking on me. Can you make him stop?”
