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Thinking back seventy years to neighborhood baseball games with old friends, I reminisce about one of those friends and what he accomplished in life.
GEORGE’S CATECHISM
By Gerard J. St. John
Author Gene Fowler used to describe memories as “making long-distance phone calls to way-stations of the past.” I make a lot of those calls. I dial up the numbers (my memories are housed in rotary phones, relics of days gone by), seeking out persons and places that I have not visited for years. Viewed from the hindsight of seventy-or-so years, I sometimes wonder whether I should have better appreciated some of my past acquaintances – for instance, George Heilmeier (who pronounced his name, “hell – mire”).
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We moved from a town where Little League meant you had to have juice--usually rich parents to even play. But in our new town we had a pony league where I learned that I could pitch fairly well, but couldn't get a good piece of the ball when batting because my myopia wasn't directed by glasses yet. I don't recall any stars that came out of those summer games. But one of my classmates who didn't play ball, used the field and his cardboard box astronomical camera to photograph Sputnik and get in the papers. He went on to watch the skies while in the Air Force and save the country from hair-trigger nuclear war twice. Another classmate who was good at playing ball became a surgeon at the University of Wisconsin. Our valedictorian became a professor at UT Austin. Others excelled in other ways, but none like George. As father of the liquid crystal diode LCD, he truly was the stuff that makes us great.
Ron