My friend Deborah Scranton has another one of her movies out this week. You can watch it Tuesday night (April 1) on Frontline...
She also made The War Tapes. A fascinating look the front lines from the people who are there.
If you have the chance to watch, Deborah's stuff is always good for the mind...
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Monday, March 24, 2008
Good News
Here's my update as to what's going on with me lately. The big news is that I have a new nephew!! He was born Friday March 14th and his name is Nathan Edward. (Edward was my grandfather who passed away when my brother and I were in middle school.) He is absolutely adorable. My older nephew, Jack, is enjoying being a big brother (so far) and loves telling me stories about the baby. My other big news is that my church had advertised for a part time Christian Education and Youth Director and I am very happy to tell you all that I got the job. It will make my schedule slightly more interesting but well worth it. Our next big project with the kids is that on April 18 - 19th we will be doing World Vision's 30 hour famine program to help raise money for hungry children around the world. So for 30 hours me, some other leaders, and a group of teenagers, will have only juice and water - I'm starting to fear a revolt half way through. This is the first year our youth group has participated and it will be interesting to see how it goes.
I think that covers my news for now. I hope all of you are doing well and I hope to hear from you soon.
I think that covers my news for now. I hope all of you are doing well and I hope to hear from you soon.
Monday, March 10, 2008
The Median Isn't the Message (by Stephen Jay Gould)
Prologue: I am getting to be of the age, aren't we all, where friends and others I know are getting the diagnosis of cancer. When confronted with Cancer, there is no way to not be scared.
I remember a couple of years back a routine ultrasound tagged me with an enlarged spleen. At the time, My doctor told me that she wanted me to see a specialist. She failed to explain to me that I was going to see an oncologist.
I'll always remember the palpable fear as I read the entry door to the waiting room. Oncology/Hematology. Wow. Cancer.
I will always remember the relief I experienced when the doctor saw me and uttered these words:
Test proved him right. Phew.
So, for the people out there who are confronted with a diagnosis of cancer or have friends who face this disease, I hope you will refer them to this entry. It is a wonderful essay by Stephen Jay Gould and it brings an important perspective to the statistics of the disease.
My life has recently intersected, in a most personal way, two of Mark Twain's famous quips. One I shall defer to the end of this essay. The other (sometimes attributed to Disraeli) identifies three species of deceit, each worse than the one before - lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Consider the standard example of stretching the truth with numbers - a case quite relevant to my story. Statistics recognizes different measures of an "average," or central tendency. The mean is our usual concept of an overall average - add up the items and divide them by the number of sharers (100 candy bars collected for five kids next Halloween will yield 20 for each in a just world). The median, a different measure of central tendency, is the halfway point. If I line up five kids by height, the median child is shorter than two and taller than the other two (who might have trouble getting their mean share of the candy).
A politician in power might say with pride, "The mean income of our citizens is $15,000 per year." The leader of the opposition might retort, "But half our citizens make less than $10,000 per year." Both are right, but neither cites a statistic with impassive objectivity. The first invokes a mean, the second a median. (Means are higher than medians in such cases because one millionaire may outweigh hundreds of poor people in setting a mean; but he can balance only one mendicant in calculating a median).
The larger issue that creates a common distrust or contempt for statistics is more troubling. Many people make an unfortunate and invalid separation between heart and mind, or feeling and intellect. In some contemporary traditions, assisted by attitudes stereotypically centered on Southern California, feelings are exalted as more "real" and the only proper basis for action - if it feels good, do it - while intellect gets short shift as a hang-up of outmoded elitism. Statistics, in this absurd dichotomy, often become the symbol of the enemy. As Hilaire Belloc wrote, "Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death."
This is a personal story of statistics, properly interpreted, as profoundly nurturing and life giving. It declares holy war on the downgrading of intellect by telling a small story about the utility of dry, academic knowledge about science. Heart and head are focal points of one body, one personality.
In July 1982, I learned that I was suffering from abdominal mesothelioma, a rare and serious cancer usually associated with exposure to asbestos. When I revived after surgery, I asked my first question of my doctor and chemotherapist: "What is the best technical literature about mesothelioma?" She replied, with a touch of diplomacy (the only departure she has ever made from direct frankness), that the medical literature contained nothing really worth reading.
Of course, trying to keep an intellectual away from literature works about as well as recommending chastity to Homo sapiens, the sexiest primate of all. As soon as I could walk, I made a beeline for Harvard's Countway medical library and punched mesothelioma into the computer's bibliographic search program. An hour later, surrounded by the latest literature on abdominal mesothelioma, I realized with a gulp why my doctor had offered that humane advice. The literature couldn't have been more brutally clear: mesothelioma is incurable, with a median mortality of only eight months after discovery. I sat stunned for about fifteen minutes, then smiled and said to myself: so that's why they didn't give me anything to read. Then my mind started to work again, thank goodness.
If a little learning could ever be a dangerous thing, I had encountered a classic example. Attitude clearly matters in fighting cancer. We don't know why (from my old-style materialistic perspective, I suspect that mental states feed back upon the immune system). But match people with the same cancer for age, class, health, socioeconomic status, and, in general, those with positive attitudes, with a strong will and purpose for living, with commitment to struggle, with an active response to aiding their own treatment and not just a passive acceptance of anything doctors say, tend to live longer. A few months later I asked Sir Peter Medawar, my personal scientific guru and a Nobelist in immunology, what the best prescription for success against cancer might be. "A sanguine personality," he replied. Fortunately (since one can't reconstruct oneself at short notice and for a definite purpose), I am, if anything, even-tempered and confident in just this manner.
Hence the dilemma for humane doctors: since attitude matters so critically, should such a somber conclusion be advertised, especially since few people have sufficient understanding of statistics to evaluate what the statements really mean? From years of experience with the small-scale evolution of Bahamian land snails treated quantitatively, I have developed this technical knowledge - and I am convinced that it played a major role in saving my life. Knowledge is indeed power, in Bacon's proverb.
The problem may be briefly stated: What does "median mortality of eight months" signify in our language? I suspect that most people, without training in statistics, would read such a statement as "I will probably be dead in eight months" - the very conclusion that must be avoided, since it isn't so, and since attitude matters so much.
I was not, of course, overjoyed, but I didn't read the statement in this vernacular way either. My technical training enjoined a different perspective on "eight months median mortality." The point is a subtle one, but profound - for it embodies the distinctive way of thinking in my own field of evolutionary biology and natural history.
We still carry the historical baggage of a Platonic heritage that seeks sharp essences and definite boundaries. (Thus we hope to find a definite "beginning of life" or "definition of death," although nature often comes to us as irreducible continua.) This Platonic heritage, with its emphasis in clear distinctions and separated indisputable entities, leads us to view statistical measures of central tendency wrongly, indeed opposite to the appropriate interpretation in our actual world of variation, shadings, and continua. In short, we view means and medians as the hard "realities," and the variation that permits their calculation as a set of transient and imperfect measurements of this hidden essence. If the median is the reality and variation around the median just a device for its calculation, the "I will probably be dead in eight months" may pass as a reasonable interpretation.
But all evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence. Variation is the hard reality, not a set of imperfect measures for a central tendency. Means and medians are the abstractions. Therefore, I looked at the mesothelioma statistics quite differently - and not only because I am an optimist who tends to see the doughnut instead of the hole, but primarily because I know that variation itself is the reality. I had to place myself amidst the variation.
When I learned about the eight-month median, my first intellectual reaction was: fine, half the people will live longer; now what are my chances of being in that half. I read for a furious and nervous hour and concluded, with relief: damned good. I possessed every one of the characteristics conferring a probability of longer life: I was young; my disease had been recognized in a relatively early stage; I would receive the nation's best medical treatment; I had the world to live for; I knew how to read the data properly and not despair.
Another technical point then added even more solace. I immediately recognized that the distribution of variation about the eight-month median would almost surely be what statisticians call "right skewed." (In a symmetrical distribution, the profile of variation to the left of the central tendency is a mirror image of variation to the right. In skewed distributions, variation to one side of the central tendency is more stretched out - left skewed if extended to the left, right skewed if stretched out to the right.) The distribution of variation had to be right skewed, I reasoned. After all, the left of the distribution contains an irrevocable lower boundary of zero (since mesothelioma can only be identified at death or before). Thus, there isn't much room for the distributions lower (or left) half - it must be scrunched up between zero and eight months. But the upper (or right) half can extend out for years and years, even if nobody ultimately survives. The distribution must be right skewed, and I needed to know how long the extended tail ran - for I had already concluded that my favorable profile made me a good candidate for that part of the curve.
The distribution was indeed, strongly right skewed, with a long tail (however small) that extended for several years above the eight month median. I saw no reason why I shouldn't be in that small tail, and I breathed a very long sigh of relief. My technical knowledge had helped. I had read the graph correctly. I had asked the right question and found the answers. I had obtained, in all probability, the most precious of all possible gifts in the circumstances - substantial time. I didn't have to stop and immediately follow Isaiah's injunction to Hezekiah - set thine house in order for thou shalt die, and not live. I would have time to think, to plan, and to fight.
One final point about statistical distributions; they apply only to a prescribed set of circumstances - in this case to survive with mesothelioma under conventional modes of treatment. If circumstances change, the distribution may alter. I was placed on an experimental protocol of treatment and, if fortune holds, will be in the first cohort of a new distribution with high median and a right tail extending to death by natural causes at advanced old age.
It has become, in my view, a bit too trendy to regard the acceptance of death as something equivalent to basic dignity. Of course I agree with the preacher of Ecclesiastes that there is a time to love and a time to die - and when my skein runs out I hope to face the end calmly and in my own way. For most situations, however, I prefer the more martial view that death is the ultimate enemy - and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light.
The swords of battle are numerous, and none more effective than humor. My death was announced at a meeting of my colleagues in Scotland, and I almost experienced the delicious pleasure of reading my obituary penned by one of my best friends (the so-and-so got suspicious and checked; he too is a statistician, and didn't expect to find me so far out on the right tail). Still, the incident provided my first good laugh after the diagnosis. Just think, I almost got to repeat Mark Twain's most famous line of all: the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.
Epilogue: Stephen Jay Gould died on May 20, 2002 from a metastatic adenocarcinoma of the lung, a form of cancer which had spread to his brain. This cancer was unrelated to his abdominal cancer, from which he had fully recovered twenty years earlier. He died in his home "in a bed set up in the library of his SoHo loft, surrounded by his wife Rhonda, his mother Eleanor, and the many books he loved.
I remember a couple of years back a routine ultrasound tagged me with an enlarged spleen. At the time, My doctor told me that she wanted me to see a specialist. She failed to explain to me that I was going to see an oncologist.
I'll always remember the palpable fear as I read the entry door to the waiting room. Oncology/Hematology. Wow. Cancer.
I will always remember the relief I experienced when the doctor saw me and uttered these words:
Well, to tell you the truth Alex you don't look to me like a person who has cancer...
Test proved him right. Phew.
So, for the people out there who are confronted with a diagnosis of cancer or have friends who face this disease, I hope you will refer them to this entry. It is a wonderful essay by Stephen Jay Gould and it brings an important perspective to the statistics of the disease.
My life has recently intersected, in a most personal way, two of Mark Twain's famous quips. One I shall defer to the end of this essay. The other (sometimes attributed to Disraeli) identifies three species of deceit, each worse than the one before - lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Consider the standard example of stretching the truth with numbers - a case quite relevant to my story. Statistics recognizes different measures of an "average," or central tendency. The mean is our usual concept of an overall average - add up the items and divide them by the number of sharers (100 candy bars collected for five kids next Halloween will yield 20 for each in a just world). The median, a different measure of central tendency, is the halfway point. If I line up five kids by height, the median child is shorter than two and taller than the other two (who might have trouble getting their mean share of the candy).
A politician in power might say with pride, "The mean income of our citizens is $15,000 per year." The leader of the opposition might retort, "But half our citizens make less than $10,000 per year." Both are right, but neither cites a statistic with impassive objectivity. The first invokes a mean, the second a median. (Means are higher than medians in such cases because one millionaire may outweigh hundreds of poor people in setting a mean; but he can balance only one mendicant in calculating a median).
The larger issue that creates a common distrust or contempt for statistics is more troubling. Many people make an unfortunate and invalid separation between heart and mind, or feeling and intellect. In some contemporary traditions, assisted by attitudes stereotypically centered on Southern California, feelings are exalted as more "real" and the only proper basis for action - if it feels good, do it - while intellect gets short shift as a hang-up of outmoded elitism. Statistics, in this absurd dichotomy, often become the symbol of the enemy. As Hilaire Belloc wrote, "Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death."
This is a personal story of statistics, properly interpreted, as profoundly nurturing and life giving. It declares holy war on the downgrading of intellect by telling a small story about the utility of dry, academic knowledge about science. Heart and head are focal points of one body, one personality.
In July 1982, I learned that I was suffering from abdominal mesothelioma, a rare and serious cancer usually associated with exposure to asbestos. When I revived after surgery, I asked my first question of my doctor and chemotherapist: "What is the best technical literature about mesothelioma?" She replied, with a touch of diplomacy (the only departure she has ever made from direct frankness), that the medical literature contained nothing really worth reading.
Of course, trying to keep an intellectual away from literature works about as well as recommending chastity to Homo sapiens, the sexiest primate of all. As soon as I could walk, I made a beeline for Harvard's Countway medical library and punched mesothelioma into the computer's bibliographic search program. An hour later, surrounded by the latest literature on abdominal mesothelioma, I realized with a gulp why my doctor had offered that humane advice. The literature couldn't have been more brutally clear: mesothelioma is incurable, with a median mortality of only eight months after discovery. I sat stunned for about fifteen minutes, then smiled and said to myself: so that's why they didn't give me anything to read. Then my mind started to work again, thank goodness.
If a little learning could ever be a dangerous thing, I had encountered a classic example. Attitude clearly matters in fighting cancer. We don't know why (from my old-style materialistic perspective, I suspect that mental states feed back upon the immune system). But match people with the same cancer for age, class, health, socioeconomic status, and, in general, those with positive attitudes, with a strong will and purpose for living, with commitment to struggle, with an active response to aiding their own treatment and not just a passive acceptance of anything doctors say, tend to live longer. A few months later I asked Sir Peter Medawar, my personal scientific guru and a Nobelist in immunology, what the best prescription for success against cancer might be. "A sanguine personality," he replied. Fortunately (since one can't reconstruct oneself at short notice and for a definite purpose), I am, if anything, even-tempered and confident in just this manner.
Hence the dilemma for humane doctors: since attitude matters so critically, should such a somber conclusion be advertised, especially since few people have sufficient understanding of statistics to evaluate what the statements really mean? From years of experience with the small-scale evolution of Bahamian land snails treated quantitatively, I have developed this technical knowledge - and I am convinced that it played a major role in saving my life. Knowledge is indeed power, in Bacon's proverb.
The problem may be briefly stated: What does "median mortality of eight months" signify in our language? I suspect that most people, without training in statistics, would read such a statement as "I will probably be dead in eight months" - the very conclusion that must be avoided, since it isn't so, and since attitude matters so much.
I was not, of course, overjoyed, but I didn't read the statement in this vernacular way either. My technical training enjoined a different perspective on "eight months median mortality." The point is a subtle one, but profound - for it embodies the distinctive way of thinking in my own field of evolutionary biology and natural history.
We still carry the historical baggage of a Platonic heritage that seeks sharp essences and definite boundaries. (Thus we hope to find a definite "beginning of life" or "definition of death," although nature often comes to us as irreducible continua.) This Platonic heritage, with its emphasis in clear distinctions and separated indisputable entities, leads us to view statistical measures of central tendency wrongly, indeed opposite to the appropriate interpretation in our actual world of variation, shadings, and continua. In short, we view means and medians as the hard "realities," and the variation that permits their calculation as a set of transient and imperfect measurements of this hidden essence. If the median is the reality and variation around the median just a device for its calculation, the "I will probably be dead in eight months" may pass as a reasonable interpretation.
But all evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence. Variation is the hard reality, not a set of imperfect measures for a central tendency. Means and medians are the abstractions. Therefore, I looked at the mesothelioma statistics quite differently - and not only because I am an optimist who tends to see the doughnut instead of the hole, but primarily because I know that variation itself is the reality. I had to place myself amidst the variation.
When I learned about the eight-month median, my first intellectual reaction was: fine, half the people will live longer; now what are my chances of being in that half. I read for a furious and nervous hour and concluded, with relief: damned good. I possessed every one of the characteristics conferring a probability of longer life: I was young; my disease had been recognized in a relatively early stage; I would receive the nation's best medical treatment; I had the world to live for; I knew how to read the data properly and not despair.
Another technical point then added even more solace. I immediately recognized that the distribution of variation about the eight-month median would almost surely be what statisticians call "right skewed." (In a symmetrical distribution, the profile of variation to the left of the central tendency is a mirror image of variation to the right. In skewed distributions, variation to one side of the central tendency is more stretched out - left skewed if extended to the left, right skewed if stretched out to the right.) The distribution of variation had to be right skewed, I reasoned. After all, the left of the distribution contains an irrevocable lower boundary of zero (since mesothelioma can only be identified at death or before). Thus, there isn't much room for the distributions lower (or left) half - it must be scrunched up between zero and eight months. But the upper (or right) half can extend out for years and years, even if nobody ultimately survives. The distribution must be right skewed, and I needed to know how long the extended tail ran - for I had already concluded that my favorable profile made me a good candidate for that part of the curve.
The distribution was indeed, strongly right skewed, with a long tail (however small) that extended for several years above the eight month median. I saw no reason why I shouldn't be in that small tail, and I breathed a very long sigh of relief. My technical knowledge had helped. I had read the graph correctly. I had asked the right question and found the answers. I had obtained, in all probability, the most precious of all possible gifts in the circumstances - substantial time. I didn't have to stop and immediately follow Isaiah's injunction to Hezekiah - set thine house in order for thou shalt die, and not live. I would have time to think, to plan, and to fight.
One final point about statistical distributions; they apply only to a prescribed set of circumstances - in this case to survive with mesothelioma under conventional modes of treatment. If circumstances change, the distribution may alter. I was placed on an experimental protocol of treatment and, if fortune holds, will be in the first cohort of a new distribution with high median and a right tail extending to death by natural causes at advanced old age.
It has become, in my view, a bit too trendy to regard the acceptance of death as something equivalent to basic dignity. Of course I agree with the preacher of Ecclesiastes that there is a time to love and a time to die - and when my skein runs out I hope to face the end calmly and in my own way. For most situations, however, I prefer the more martial view that death is the ultimate enemy - and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light.
The swords of battle are numerous, and none more effective than humor. My death was announced at a meeting of my colleagues in Scotland, and I almost experienced the delicious pleasure of reading my obituary penned by one of my best friends (the so-and-so got suspicious and checked; he too is a statistician, and didn't expect to find me so far out on the right tail). Still, the incident provided my first good laugh after the diagnosis. Just think, I almost got to repeat Mark Twain's most famous line of all: the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.
Epilogue: Stephen Jay Gould died on May 20, 2002 from a metastatic adenocarcinoma of the lung, a form of cancer which had spread to his brain. This cancer was unrelated to his abdominal cancer, from which he had fully recovered twenty years earlier. He died in his home "in a bed set up in the library of his SoHo loft, surrounded by his wife Rhonda, his mother Eleanor, and the many books he loved.
Sunday, March 9, 2008
Todd Clay
Hi folks,
A quick reminder, Todd Clay would love to hear from folks. Unfortunately he doesn't have email.
You can call or write to him here:
Todd Clay
549 Heather Dr.
Dayton, OH 45405
(937) 278-5454
Cheers!
Alex
A quick reminder, Todd Clay would love to hear from folks. Unfortunately he doesn't have email.
You can call or write to him here:
Todd Clay
549 Heather Dr.
Dayton, OH 45405
(937) 278-5454
Cheers!
Alex
Saturday, March 8, 2008
Tonya finds Jon Truemper on Classmates.com
Yes - you found me......I am working for QVC (TV Shopping Channel) - I run operational planning for our distributions centers and call centers. I got married about 5 years ago, and have a 7 month old daughter. I live in Lansdale, Pa
Tonya writes that she will send an email address when she gets one...
Excellent! Our Alumni group grows...
Thursday, March 6, 2008
Jim Nieberding=cephjedi. Still playing with animals.
Hey Gang!
As I told Tonya, and the Blog through her proxy submission, the Bronco Junction gang finding me at this time is an amazing coincidence....
...My mother passed away on Christmas, and cleaning her house was like an archeological dig of memories for my Brother and Father! We recovered 16 copy-paper sized boxes of photographs- dating back before my parents met!
Anyhoo....Sunday afternoon's sorting session turned up a few photos from Bronco Junction.
...ahhhh. Memory lane. It's really not interesting stuff. As much as we'd like to relive moments like Boy's 4's hairspray-powered lake monster, "jamaican cliff diving" at the pool (how did we not kill ourselves?) the floating bedroom scene, or any of myriad memories that came flooding back...
but all my photos are: Dorky Jimmy on Big Ben. Dorky Jimmy in front of the bunk car. Dorky Jimmy near the cafeteria hall. Dorky Jimmy down by the lake...etc etc etc.... All the "mom's dropping her kid off at summer camp" photos.
...And of course when I find them again, I'll scan them and post them.
...So Alex..... Can you still solve the Rubik's Cube?
Quick bio:
- Jim
As I told Tonya, and the Blog through her proxy submission, the Bronco Junction gang finding me at this time is an amazing coincidence....
...My mother passed away on Christmas, and cleaning her house was like an archeological dig of memories for my Brother and Father! We recovered 16 copy-paper sized boxes of photographs- dating back before my parents met!
Anyhoo....Sunday afternoon's sorting session turned up a few photos from Bronco Junction.
...ahhhh. Memory lane. It's really not interesting stuff. As much as we'd like to relive moments like Boy's 4's hairspray-powered lake monster, "jamaican cliff diving" at the pool (how did we not kill ourselves?) the floating bedroom scene, or any of myriad memories that came flooding back...
but all my photos are: Dorky Jimmy on Big Ben. Dorky Jimmy in front of the bunk car. Dorky Jimmy near the cafeteria hall. Dorky Jimmy down by the lake...etc etc etc.... All the "mom's dropping her kid off at summer camp" photos.
...And of course when I find them again, I'll scan them and post them.
...So Alex..... Can you still solve the Rubik's Cube?
Quick bio:
- Still got asthma. boo, hiss.
- Paying job: AudioVisual Engineer for Uncle Sam. I live in Point of Rocks, MD, and work in Rockville.
- Non paying Jobs: Marine Biologist, Guitarist, Zoologist, Inventor.
- Just turned...ulp...39.
- Married, no kids.
- Jim
Tonya Found: Jim Nieberding
Hi Tonya!
What a weird coincidence! Yeah- I went to Camp Bronco Junction....I'm thinking 81-82. I just found some of the pictures from way back then at my mom's house. Boy did a string of memories come flooding back!
My office email is xxx@xxxx.xxx and at home I'm xxx@xxxx.xx. please pass it along to Alex and anyone else from the camp!
Thanks for getting in touch, and take care!
Cheers, Jim
Way to go Tonya!
-Alex
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Found: Mark Elenko
Begin forwarded message:
From: Mark Elenko <elenko@fas.harvard.edu>
Date: March 4, 2008 2:13:12 AM EST
To: Matthew Mintz <mmintz@mfa.gwu.edu>
Cc: ahorovitz@k12.com
Subject: Re: Did you go to an asthma camp in West Virginia
Matthew, Alex,
Wow. Yes, you have the right me. I'm thunderstruck by hearing from you and seeing the blog - it's wonderful. Years ago I reserved broncojunction.org and broncojunction.com to see if anyone would look them up and email me but was resigned to not hearing from anyone - I was practically speechless when I saw your name and subject line (I've just set both domains to forward to theblogspot page). I would love to join the blog - for google/blogger I use elenko@fas.harvard.edu.
Thank you for starting the blog and finding me. Regards -Mark
Good work Matthew! :-)
Monday, March 3, 2008
Lunch with Alex
Lunch with Alex was great today. I had not read his post yet and told me about his conversation with Tonya. I had totally forgotten about the David Saenz bed floating incident! I honestly don't remember what set me off, but I do remember being pretty mad. (In retrospect, I am not sure what I was thinking, given the guy was a black belt in some form of martial arts). The one thing I do remember, was that his bed was made perfectly:sheets, blanket, pillow,etc. I wanted the visual effect of his pefectly made bed in the middle of the lake.
Christina's post was great! Sounds like you have had some very interesting experiences. I am a little surprised about the children part, only because I remember Christina as being very maternal and never a harsh word out of her mouth. The first time I met Chris Hung was in 1978. She was fishing in the lake (They used to stock it with fish. No fishing poles; just a stick, string and hook.) I couldn't catch anything, but Chris just kept reeling them in (though not literally, because again there were no reels on the poles). However, she would immediately throw the fish back in, because she didn't want to be mean to the fish. Sounds like some things haven't changed.
I am so glad that Tonya kept everything, because I can't find a thing. It would be great to digitize and post! Would be happy to support this effort.
Alex is on the money about supervision, or lack thereof. I think we were CIT's in both '81 and '82. Is it ever wise to put a 13 year old in charge of anything? Alex I were talking about the creek monster contest, and the year we built a floating monster that actually breathed fire. Who permitted the adolescent boys to use a butane lighter and an aersol spray to emit flames from something made of paper, sheets and sticks while waist deep in a creek?
Lastly, we need to expand this forum. We need updates from more of you, and need to find others that are out there. Where is Jeff McDade? Kathy Gross?
I remember Mark Elenko as being incredibly smart for his age, and always thought he would go to Harvard and do something in science or computers. Is this him?
That's all for now.
Dinner w/ Tonya
Tonya McClain and I met for dinner in DC last night and had a wonderful time. We dined at Sequoia (3000 K Street) where the food was ok, but the company was great. For me it brought back a flood of wonderful memories.
Tonya had all her stuff from 26 years ago and we poured over it.
The 1982 yearbook has the wonderfully original Stacey Moore artwork ( a collectors item to be sure). Tonya and I agreed that it was time to digitize these and she is going to endeavor to get that done. When finished she'll send me the results so I can put them online for all to see.
One of the topics of discussion that came up was how we were surprised at how (seemingly) little adult supervision we were subjected to. We marveled at the things we "got away with" at ages 12 & 13 respectively. Fellow campers, do you folks remember it that way too?
Tonya had all her stuff from 26 years ago and we poured over it.
The 1982 yearbook has the wonderfully original Stacey Moore artwork ( a collectors item to be sure). Tonya and I agreed that it was time to digitize these and she is going to endeavor to get that done. When finished she'll send me the results so I can put them online for all to see.
One of the topics of discussion that came up was how we were surprised at how (seemingly) little adult supervision we were subjected to. We marveled at the things we "got away with" at ages 12 & 13 respectively. Fellow campers, do you folks remember it that way too?
Perhaps some of the staff can respond? What were you guys doing when we were sneaking out at night?
We laughed and laughed at our collective memories. I must say, a huge grin appeared on my face when she reminded me of the time that Mattew Mintz sent all of David Saenz' possessions floating down the Buttlick on a mattress. Matthew, I can't remember why you did that, but I do
remember how mad you were. I seem to remember being an un-indicted co-conspirator. Can you tell the story?
I'm having lunch with Mattew at 11:30 today...
Hope to see others of you soon.
Cheers!
Alex
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