"I was a very naive young man, and I may still be ignorant about a lot of things." Joe Namath

 I was raised in a very supporting extended family.  Aunts, uncles, grandparents all loved me, gave me attention and bragged on me.  My teachers in school gave me encouragement and applauded my minor successes.  Gosh, even my basketball coach for the junior varsity team (I was third string) showed great appreciation when I made a basket.  The professors in college gave me good grades and often called on me in class.  My point is that all of the adult authority figures in my life through college wanted me to be successful and were happy when I was.  That changed after college and shocked me.  I’ll relate an incident – that destroyed my naiveté - that was a ripple and altered my life drastically.

I had gone to California after college (B.S., physics) because I knew there was several great universities for grad school and there were jobs galore for anyone with a technical degree.  It was the midst of the aero-space boom.  So my plan was to get a job, establish residency and apply for grad school and it worked like a charm.  Within two weeks of arriving in California I had three job offers (while staying at the “Y” in downtown LA) and choose one that involved helping the development of ion-propulsion rocket engines.  My first real job.  As an aside, I did design a gizmo that went to the moon and back.  (For the curious, the gizmo was an ultra-high vacuum seal that was impervious to cesium vapor.)

I started applying for grad school and in February, 1964 was accepted by the University of Southern California with a good financial offer to start that fall.  I was happy and thought my boss would be as well.  After all, aren’t adult authority figures supposed to cheer when you succeed?  When I told my boss of the development I was promptly fired.  Now from a mature point of view I can understand why he would do that.  His job centered on the success of the project – not my success.  But, at the time, I didn’t understand and was dismayed.  So I was without a job with a few months to kill.  I found a part time job managing a pool hall, on Colorado Blvd. In Pasadena, that paid enough, with unemployment supplement, for food and rent.  It was in that pool hall – designed (large picture windows, carpet, no booze) to attract families – that I met my first wife by whom I had two great sons.  I talked to SoCal and they found a job for me in a nuclear physics lab for the summer before I enrolled.  A big ripple.

I never looked at authority figures the same way after that.  “What’s their motivation?”

2014 Lester C. Welch