Teaching Schedule

-- Fall 2009

Two Questions

There are two questions that I am often asked. Here are some rather vague, but hopefully interesting, answers:

• How old are you? I'm so old that ...

When I was a kid, only airplanes had seat belts. All telephones were black and had dials. No i-pods or walkman players, we had desk-top taperecorders that used reel-to-reel tape. There were no CDs or even cassette tapes.

Americans smoked everywhere and did not worry about the health effects. There was no warning on cigarette packaging. Everyone was blissfully ignorant of the hazards.

I remember President Kennedy, the twist, Beatle-mania, and the British Invasion.

In school we did calculations with a pencil and paper. I learned to use a slide rule. I saw my first handheld calculator after entering college. They cost the same as 3 months rent, so I continued doing calculations with a pencil and paper.

We typed our homework and term papers, made corrections by hand, and--if that got too messy--typed the assignments all over again. Between high school and college Apollo 11 took a man to the moon. Then flower power rocked the world at the Woodstock Festval promoting hippy ideals of love, peace, and recreational drugs.

There were no lap-top or even desk-top computers. They were all floor-top computers. There were no screens. We put instructions on punch cards, which we handed to professional computer operators. We picked up the output--on special computer paper or punch cards--about three hours later. If our programs did not work, we thought about them long and hard before submitting them again.

Young males were conscripted for military service by lottery. College students studied hard so that they wouldn't have to go to Vietnam. Some got shot anyway. Universities all across America went on strike. Draft card burners were arrested and sent to federal prisons. Thousands of young people were arrested in Washington DC in a single day. And then came the Watergate scandal.

• How long have you been in Japan? I'm a Showa gaijin.

I remember Momoe-chan and Pink Lady. My students knew how do the Pink Lady dances.

Like today only sumo wrestlers wore their hair in the tranditional chonmage fashion, but almost all Japanese had black hair. Brown hair was extremely rare.

Shotoku Taishi was on the ten-thousand and five-thousand-yen notes, Ito Hirobumi was on the one-thousand-yen bill, and there was a 500-yen bill, too.

On a few occasions when I wanted to print something up in Japanese, I did it using a Japanese kanji typewriter.

Esteemed Colleagues

General Studies Division	Daniel Dunkley Jane Lightburn Glenn Gagne Makoto Sasaki Masamichi Washitake
Dept of Global English	Masami Hatano Tsuneo Ueda
JC Dept of English Communication 1996-2005 1996-2000	. . Toshiro Yui Sharell Reintsma

In Memory of my senpai Joe Shepard (1923-2000)

California Institute of Technology

Caltech Wrestling Team
Caltech History Majors

Conferences

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