personal
Friday before labor day
He flies onto the train and sits knee to knee in front of me.
Dark t-shirt and jeans. Grasping a black plastic bag between his feet. Gray streaked hair. Flushed in this ridiculous heat but not sweating. Rough but not filthy. Not so old (not so much older than me) but too old to be putting up with this.
Swollen blue below one eye. Cracked above the other. Raw, inflated, white puss flesh and a long streak of red. Blood stipples out the pores of his chin. But his attention is to his hand. A locus of pain he clenches and shakes.
He asks me where the B meets the A.
I tell him he’s bleeding. He touches his face as if surprised that pain had a source.
He needs a clinic but St Vincents is bankrupt. Anyway, he rides the subway to Brooklyn. All night in a chair for an aspirin is not worth losing a shelter bed, his bed.
Adrenalized, returned from the looking glass he tells me what. I parse one sentence out of ten but I get his intent.
This is no movie. Two guys jumped him. They beat the crap out of him but he punched them to the ground. Kicked them in the face as hard as he could. Kicked them while they were down. Kicked them quiet.
Why do they pick on the old? They took $200. To his surprise and joy, they are worse for it. He’s on the B train. They need a doctor or a fucking grave.
This is one of those moments where a crowd is empty except for one man and the one person he happens to talk to.
I give him cash for food or bandages not enough for both. He reaches out to thank me. Touches my shoulder with the hand he touched the wounds on his face and gets off at my transfer. I remain locked in my seat. I’ll take the long way home.
Short link: http://jkat.me/f1SOEH
This man is why my father became an engineer
As a boy growing up in West Virginia, my father wanted to study science but a high school teacher convinced him he had no talent for it.
That man was not why my father became an engineer.
My father joined the Navy, served in the Korean War and became a non-commissioned officer.
While enlisted, he took a class in radio/radar technology. The instructor, a well-respected engineer, turned out to be a great teacher – at least for my father. Which is great enough for me.
My father became the best student in the class. The instructor’s encouragement convinced him to pursue a career in engineering.
My father earned degrees in electrical and a nuclear engineering and made a long career working with technologies evolved from those he learned in that first class.
Now retired, my father decided to find out who this teacher was who had made such an impact on his life.
Nick Holonyak invented the Light Emitting Diode (LED). He is winner of the IEEE Medal of Honor.
Before that he was the first post graduate student of John Bardeen who with fellow Nobel Laureate, Walter Brattain, invented the first transistor.
Somewhere in between these accomplishments, he taught engineering to a class of military personnel.
When my father speaks of Nick Holonyak it is with gratitude and wonder.
My father, the engineer, encouraged me to love science. I studied mathematics and physics and make my living building software.
I encourage my grade school aged daughter to love science. This year, my daughter’s robotics team competed at the New York City FIRST LEGO League Championship.
These are perhaps small things to a man who assisted Nobel Laureates, won prestigious engineering awards, worked at Bell and GE Labs and continues to teach at a research university in a position he’s held for over forty years.
But Nick Holonyak is the reason my father became an engineer. His teaching kindled an enthusiasm that is a source of generational wealth to our family.
Thank you.
Short link: http://jkat.me/h3sJGC
Flatbush Venue & Ocean Avenue Brooklyn
Some more pictures of Flatbush and Ocean by the Prospect Park subway station.
Short link: http://jkat.me/gFOJFS
