A man I worked with at MIT’s college radio station¹ wrote to me recently. He mentioned he was now an MIT professor. I shared my stories of MIT Kindness, to encourage him to show the same kindness to his students.

Listing these stories made me realize that kindness and empathy produced my degree. Thanksgiving isn’t the only time for giving thanks. I try to do it every day. I am thankful for these generous people who made my degree possible:² Yes, these are repeats, which doesn’t reduce their wonderful grace.

• * The T.A. whose pity pass for second term calculus ³allowed me to meet graduation requirements. If only I could find and thank her.
• * Prof. Will Watson and the faculty of the Sloan School.  Watson’s “pass” when I had earned an incomplete, gave me the units required⁴ for graduation. Since 1974 I thought the granting of my degree was a close-run thing. Recently, I have been asked to consider that Dean Pounds was pulling my leg.
• * Prof. Anthony Sinskey ⁵ who told me I was in the Twilight of a Mediocre Academic Career. He was right, and he thus helped me choose my life path.
  
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  Footnotes

1. 1. Then WTBS, now WMBR. ↩︎
2. 2. I played a small role. ↩︎
3. 3. 18.02 ↩︎
4. 4. 360. MIT doesn’t do hours, but units, which account for homework and lab time as well as class time ↩︎
5. 5. My freshman advisor ↩︎

(BOSTON)–The least interesting part of the two-hour interview was its purpose: Charlton Heston is starring in Soylent Green which opened recently at the Music Hall. Here we have a man whose life and mind are clearly more interesting than any movie Hollywood has ever put out.

The interview came just a week after the Academy Awards. The call went out for a press briefing, at the Ritz Carlton. I went.

A few knocks on the door bring no response, and I am ready to leave when another reporter shows. We knock together, and an MGM publicist opens up.

Peeking around him, we see the press conference.

Not a room full of people and TV lights. Three others are there. Introductions are never made, but one seems to be Real Paper, another from Harvard, still another sounded like New York Magazine. And, of course, The Tech.

Sometime later, Chuck will admit that he is thankful he no longer appears on dreary early morning talk shows, where the host has never seen one of his films.

Some print journalists, he will concede, do their homework, especially the British (he mentioned the Manchester Guardian).

But, of course, all a critic needs is “a job and a typewriter,” although it would be nice if they also have “a love of film.”

But they must strive to “serve the public, not the industry.”

But that is later. Right now, as the saying goes, I am “close enough that I could reach out and touch him” if I wanted to. He makes the first move. The traditional firm handshake and “Hi, I’m Chuck Heston.”

He is tanned, but not ostentatiously so. A small but perceptible paunch hangs over his unbelted ban-roll pants. Large, circular gold-colored clock-face cuff-links hold his French cuffs together on a shirt open at the collar. He wears the traditional black calf-length socks (yes, his pants covered them, but he did pause to pull them up once; the man behind the myth), with no shoes on as he pads about his suite.

With the slightest prompting he tells beguiling stories that cover the range of his knowledge, and eventually someone (well, me actually) remembers to ask him about the film Soylent Green, to the obvious relief of the two MGM publicity agents in the room. Chuck tells you how PR people get upset at him for not plugging the film hard enough.

“You have to talk about what they want to talk about,” he says. When you ask him about the title, he begins “they are words that do not yet exist, as the publicists delight in pointing out.”

The word refers to a type of manufactured food. More on the film later.

Heston put his caveat at the end, and that’s too bad, because it meant that the four of us didn’t have time to pursue his contention that “the more public I become, the more private my real identity.”

He went on to claim expertise at “being interviewed for the public, because my own self is not very deeply involved.” He explained, “What I know is involved. My self is not. I don’t particularly enjoy tours, even though I am good at them. I do what I’m paid to do. That’s one reason why I am one of the few people who get a percentage of the gross, although I tour for films I don’t have a percentage of too.”

Heston was a multi-term president of the Screen Actor’s Guild, and has just recently returned to the board of that organization. Although he warned us that his information might be a little stale, he answered some question about current issues in that realm as best he could: there are about 26,000 members of the SAG, many of whom are unemployed.

“There are about 2,000 highly skilled professional actors in that group,” Heston said, “but I would hate to have to pick them out.” There have been suggestions for a committee to weed out the membership, but Heston doesn’t think that is possible.

As of two years ago, he noted, film actors got 28% of their income from theatrical films and 72% from TV work. Of that, two-thirds came from commercials.

This has been the source of a current controversy about the use of “real people” in commercials as a major factor in the unemployment that is ravaging the industry.

TV reruns have also become controversial: the old season, which used to run some 36 shows, has been whittled down to the point where some shows only shoot 23 or 24 episodes, depending on specials to prevent them from running any episode more than twice in the same year (and sometimes not succeeding).

Actors are a little upset about this; so is the President who has stepped into the fracas on the side opposite the TV networks.

As Heston pointed out, he will readily express his opinions, but he will not express himself. As the interview went on for almost two hours, he covered a range of interests that would speak well of a renaissance man: acting and film, education, economics of the film industry (not everyone in that industry cares about such things). In general, he said that acting is his thing, wherever it is done, and his prime goal in life is to improve as an actor.

Heston spoke of two children: his son, who is in a co-op program in marine biology, and a daughter who is toying with the idea of a career in show business.

Heston makes an especial point of warning people away from acting as a career. “There is no future in it,” he said,” and the odds are very high against getting any regular work at all; the odds against doing well, of having any say in the vehicles you work in, those odds are astronomical.”

Heston said that Soylent Green would not have been made if he had not been pushing for it. It was the kind of vehicle he wanted to appear in. “In a sense its propaganda,” he said, “but it’s the kind that works.” He went on to explain that only if the message comes second to the entertainment could a message film get across to the American film-going public (or, it seemed, to much of any film going public, except the students of the hundreds of film schools in American universities, of whom Heston said “They are turning out many more people than there are room for in the industry.”) and that this was just such a film.

Heston, it seems, has wanted to make a statement about ecology and where the world is heading for some time. So when this film appeared on the horizon, he took it on.

Regrettably, this reviewer would have to suggest that perhaps Heston should not publicly take responsibility for the film. It undeniably has its moments of drama, of humor, and of entertainment. And, of course, it has the sentimental last performance of Edward G. Robinson. But there wasn’t much else to hold the attention of the audience.

The science is almost unquestionably accurate: a UCLA professor served as technical consultant, and assures us of that in a press release. We believe him.

New York City may very well have 40 million people in it by 2022, and 80% of them may be out of work (this is not the science part, but is speculation.) And, as shown in the film, the income gap which exists now will undoubtedly widen, with the very rich and the very poor coexisting in the United States, as they do now in the rest of the world.

But the story of Soylent Green, an artificial food substance supposedly made out of plankton (see how fast you can figure out what its really made of) and of Heston’s work as a police detective is often confusing and underexplained.

What is a book? What politics are left? These and other questions are not explained sufficiently. Wondering about them distracts from enough of the plot to make it difficult to follow.

Most of the acting performances were unspectacular, and the appearance of Chuck Connors, and several other too-well-known faces detracts from the film: you sit there and say to yourself, “I don’t know his name, and I really don’t care, but I swear I’ve seen the face.”

Thus, for this reviewer, the message was clear and the entertainment wasn’t.

The most entertaining point during my showing was the trailer for a Vincent Price film playing across the street.

But now for the odd part of this review (OK, some of the other parts were little odd, too. . . By the way, ban-roll is a kind of pants which requires no belt): I recommend that you see the film anyway.

Why? Because while it doesn’t precisely entertain, it does interest, amuse, speculate, and provoke thought, and those are all good things for a film to do, even if it misses on its primary goal. Technicians, after all, are going to cause most of this to happen, and it would be nice if you thought about the end results.

As Frank Sinatra once sang, “Regrets I’ve had a few/Too few to mention.” I have almost none. There were some regrets at the time, but in retrospect, I am batting .999.

I almost regret skipping nearly all my classes at MIT, but I ended up with a degree, and a happy life as a writer/journalist/D-list TV personality. I don’t regret it because, had I gone to class, I might be a miserable scientist or engineer.

Actually, I do have one regret. I was reading a list of 23 regrets at age 60. One resonated: “Not forgiving sooner.”

I come from grudge holders on both sides of my family. Estrangements that lasted for decades, usually until death, and so it was that I held intense grudges… bordering on hatred… for people I thought had done me wrong. The bitterness lasted for decades. Fortunately, I had a spiritual awakening that allowed me to let go of all that dark matter in my heart.

Clearly, some grudges are justified because they involve unforgivable acts. The problem I have with that now is that there are almost no unforgivable acts. And of course, hatred is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies. A grudge or an estrangement, held long enough, can curdle into hatred.
continued next week…

This is a list of my first adult jobs. Which one doesn’t belong?

Associated Press
United Press International
Bank of America
Oregon Journal
Computer Systems News
Information Week

Yes, that’s correct, Bank of America. I dealt with my BofA job two years ago, but will put it in some perspective.

I quit my job at UPI Hartford to go to San Francisco to write my book, Aspirin Therapy, and to follow my girlfriend who had moved there.

(Bureau Manager James V. Healion, who told me, “Your head and your heart can’t be in two different places,” nevertheless marked my personnel file “recommend not rehire” when I left to put my head where my heart was.)

Our apartment cost $450 a month (2887 Green St., Cow Hollow, San Francisco, near the Presidio.). Inflate that with the CPI and the rent today would be $2,000, but the actual rent for similar flats is $4,500.

I worked on the book for three months, paying my share of the rent out of my advance. That money ran out about when I finished. I needed a job. UPI San Francisco was full up, as was AP.

I swallowed hard and took a job in PR.

I was the Public Information Officer for Northern California branches and the computer and credit card departments. I had some wonderful experiences, including frequent lunches with the Chronicle’s Peter Greenberg at the rooftop Bankers’ Club in what was then BofA world headquarters, 555 California Street in San Francisco. I also enjoyed a trip to the American Bankers’ Association Technology Conference in New Orleans.

The PR department was on the 20th floor; my view of North Beach was so distracting I had to turn my desk around to face the door.

Things were going fine, and I got a big raise from $18k to $22k in early November. Two weeks later, my relationship ended and I quit to take a paycut at the Oregon Journal, which would have been a pay hike a month earlier.

During my freshman year at college, I worked the weekend sunrise shift as an engineer at a radio station in the suburbs of Boston (the chief engineer of which reads this column, which is why I name neither him nor the station).

Like many engineers, I was not scrupulous about taking the hourly transmitter readings on the hour.  By 1970, the federal requirement to do so was a relic, as modern transmitters were so stable.

Well, except this one day. It had been 90 minutes since my last reading. I was sitting a few feet away from the transmitter when I noticed something. Or rather, something missing. I realized it was the steady drone of the fan which dissipated the enormous heat from the tubes inside. By the time I got to the panel, all the meters were pinned, in a way that indicated it was shorted out.

I called the chief engineer at home and woke him up. He mentioned that there was supposed to be a fan interlock that shut the transmitter down, but it had obviously failed. He asked me how long the transmitter had been cooking; I couldn’t say.

“Open the back,” he said, walking me through some diagnostics. “Do you see two big silver tubes?” “All I see is two big black tubes.” I had contributed to the most extensive cookout I would ever attend; those fried tubes cost a whole lot of money to replace. Partly the fault of the failed interlock. Partly my fault.

This one’s for the crew of The Computer Chronicles, who heard it about 50 times.

In the summer of 1970, I was a vacation relief engineer at KGW-TV in Portland. One day, I was the sound man for the local evening news. Tom Craven was the director. “You’d better not screw up,” he told me. I nervously checked and double-checked all the microphones.

John Cardis was the anchor, with Jack Cappel doing the weather. Things went fine for the first 20 minutes. In those days, the sports guy ran downstairs from the newsroom to the set at the last minute so he could include late baseball scores from the East.

Pat Stuckey literally runs into the studio, and sits down just as Tom calls, “Open Cardis mic, fade up on camera 1.” John says, “Now with the sports, here’s Pat Stuckey.” “Camera 2, Stuckey mic,” says Craven.

Still Awake? Read the rest of this interminable anecdote here.

(length warning) In 1969, I was visiting M at KLIQ. He served as the engineer for a talk show hosted by a venerable Portland radio tradition, former and future disc jockey, Bob MacAnulty. Bob was an asthmatic, fired from nearly every station in town at one time or another; once a big star, he was on the way down, as witness the fact that he was working for Dave Jack at KLIQ (the bottom of the barrel). A few years later, Bob died on the air, during an overnight shift, and wasn't discovered until some listener raised the alarm because the needle was skipping in the final groove of some record.

Anyway, I was in the control room, chatting with M. He explained that Mr. Jack had supplied the board operator with a can of mace, a spray human repellent, after some incidents of kids from the amusement park knocking on the door and disturbing station operations. "Let me see that," I said. "I wonder what this stuff smells like?" I popped the lid on the can of mace and aimed it at the back of my hand. I thought I aimed it at the back of my hand. It turns out Mace does not come out as a fine mist, like hairspray. It comes out in a stream, which travels some distance. The stream shot over my hand and hit the opposite wall… just over the air conditioning duct leading into the tiny on-air studio where MacAnulty was on the air. He broke out in an immediate coughing fit. I had maced the on-air talent. He moved to another studio. He hadn't seen me do it, and I don't think M ratted on me.

In 1969, no one, at least no one in Portland, Oregon, knew from “SAT prep.” At Benson, the city’s top high school, we all believed the myth, propagated by the College Board that you couldn’t study for the exam, that it measured innate ability. I didn’t even know enough to take it early, so I could retake it if I did badly. So, I signed up for the last test date in December 1969; any later and I couldn’t apply to colleges in 1970. I took the Math and Verbal SAT tests in the morning, and then three achievement tests in the afternoon: math, physics and chemistry. I don’t even think they allow you to take all those tests on the same day now. Out of 800, I scored 750 on the math and 780 on the verbal; I was in the 90th percentile. On the other hand, I tanked on the achievements (I had taken physics two years before, and hadn’t taken calculus). I went home and slept for 17 hours. Four months later, I was admitted to Cal Tech and MIT, rejected by Stanford (just like Marlow). I chose MIT.

(Length Warning) In December 1968, a pre-season wrestling meet was held in the Tigard High School Gym. I was wrestling varsity, 191 pounds. The man I was up against looked like a gorilla who lifted weights. I broke into a sweat just looking at him. We went out for the first round, which begins with both wrestlers standing up facing each other. He instantly went in for the takedown. I braced myself and planted my feet. Alas, I apparently created some kind of suction between the bottom of my shoe and the mat, because when my body twisted my foot stayed still. Something had to give. It was my left knee. I screamed. I was in immediate, intense pain. I don't remember whether my opponent pinned me or I forfeited. Our family doctor put me on crutches for six weeks. My knee felt better. I went back to wrestling. My first day back, I was climbing a rope. There was a loud snap (it sounded loud to me, maybe it was just a sound inside me), and suddenly my legs would no longer hold me. Since my arms were too weak to climb a rope, I slid rapidly down, burning my hands. I limped to the office, and called home. The next day, we went to see a specialist. He suggested surgery. Mom asked him how soon, and he said, “Tomorrow.” I was out of school for four weeks. The operation itself wasn't so bad, but the recovery was hell. Every time I coughed or hiccupped, the pain was intense. I remember cheating on an English exam (it was supposed to be closed book, and I opened the book. I think it was Moby Dick). Afterwards, I had a scar and a pretty good knee, but the injury ended my athletic career. I got a second varsity wrestling letter anyway, which I thought was swell of the coach, although I have never been sure how the other wrestlers felt about it.

My announcing career began in the spring of 1966, when I was picked to be the public address announcer at the Beaumont track and field day. I was having the time of my life. I was so thrilled and excited that I really didn’t pay attention to the slip of paper two girls handed me, saying, “Would you page him please.” If I’d been more alert, I probably would have been suspicious of their giggling. “Would Paul McCartney please report to the judge’s desk. Paul McCartney, please report.” I was a huge Beatles fan. I can only assume that I read it out loud because I was basically reading anything people put in my hand that day. The crowd burst out in laughter. I know I blushed, because I often blushed at that age.