I guess I was born adventurous. While my brother was first out of the womb, I believe that I kicked him out and gave him a concussion trying to get out of that confining place and out into the world. From then on, I spearheaded most of our ventures away from our confining age defined neighborhood, many tales that I've already told. Unlike for our younger brothers, our parents were too busy working. So we ventured on our own. Once in a while they took occasional vacations from us to Milwaukee, but no farther.
Before I went to college, the farthest I had gone from my three hometowns was to visit relatives in northern Indiana, and that was when Roger and I were only four or five. But I remember two songs from my youth that beckoned me: Far Away Places that appeared on the radio in 1948 when I was six. That haunting tune made me dream of places that I had read about in books… Magical places with strange sounding names, strange cultures and languages. I couldn't wait to see them in person. Like in the movies.
And when I was eight, in 1950, Frankie Laine sang The Cry of the Wild Goose on the radio and I was hooked on flying far away someday. I had heard the call of wild geese flying over in the fall and spring and wondered where they went. I was also inspired by classics like Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe. But, except for one or two excursions to Minneapolis, similar brief trips to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and our Explorer Scout trip to the Canadian Boundary Waters north of Minnesota into Ontario, we rarely left Wisconsin, even through college.
Near the end of our senior year in high school, Roger took the bus to Detroit to take the test to enter General Motors Institute. His score wasn't high enough for him to be accepted. But after college he became a professional engineer for the State of Pennsylvania and traveled widely, once even working for a British company in Philadelphia and spending time in the British Isles as a result. Later, he traveled to Europe looking for cars to buy. As I wrote before, Roger bought a beautiful Mercedes 280 SE sedan in Germany in 1985 and brought it home to Illinois.
My longest trip out of the state happened in 1965-66 when I joined our college church group to the Quadrennial Conference of the Methodist Church in Omaha Nebraska. I recall that we drove to Minneapolis and then got on a bus that took us through the night. It was below zero outside in late December, after Christmas. I had a bad cold that put me in misery the whole trip. I remember going to the restroom in the back of the bus. Thank goodness there was one. It was while we were driving through the city of Omaha in the middle of the night. The bus was turning the corner every block or so, and I couldn't keep my footing as I slammed back and forth in that small room.
When we got to Omaha, I joined about eight ministers in a large motel room in the Pershing Motor Inn where I had a place to sleep on the floor. Everything took place in the convention hall and other venues anyway, so all we did was sleep there. I remember going down a long buffet table where my paper plate became so filled with wet food that it caved in as I tried to carry it off somewhere to sit and eat. I watched the plate in slow motion fall to the floor with a splat and food all over. People came up to me and told me to get another plate. They had mopped it up before I came back that way again. Very efficient while feeding a lot of people.
The venues were all around town and I only remember going to a church where a campus minister from Oberlin was lecturing on "The Playboy Philosophy." I really enjoyed that and later gave part of the Sunday sermon on the subject at the Methodist Church back on campus when we returned. I have no idea what I said, but I have read many segments from that philosophy over the years. Some of it just coming true when it comes to freedom for women to have equal say in things. At that event, male minister attendance far outweighed women. But the students, like me, were about equally men and women.
Before long, I checked in at the infirmary and had something like a 104° temperature. I spent the next couple of days in the motor hotel in bed sleeping and recovering. Fortunately, I was strong enough to attend the New Year's Eve midnight lecture by Martin Luther King. I was in the balcony on the left-hand side over the stage because the main floor was for the high ranking church people. That was fortunate, because King came in on my side of the stage with a bodyguard on either side and spoke from there. It was a rousing speech that had some of the elements of the one he gave at the Lincoln Memorial. I'm so glad I had come so far and managed to recover from my cold in time to see him speak. Less than 40 feet away. If anything wanted me to join the cause of civil rights, it was that speech. Some were dying and I was willing to do what it took to change others impression of black people for the better.
I believe it was spring break during my senior year in college, 1965, that I got wind of spending it in Spain. A student had arranged for the trip and it required a certain number of students to sign up and pay the amount, I believe, around $120 for the entire week, including plane flights, hotels and time on the beach. A week before we were to leave, the student had signed up only about 17 people. Needing about 25 to fill the plane, she had to cancel and return our money. It was my first missed trip. Something I just wasn't geared to. I always followed through with my plans to travel.
In the meantime, while California dreaming, I got an assistantship at the University of Wisconsin in Madison to study industrial engineering in January, 1966. My advisor was the renowned head of the department, Dr. Gerald (Gerry) Nadler. We were working on a taxonomy of patient care, hopefully to develop a mathematical model. And then, in April, I received a Wheeler fellowship at Stanford. I couldn't pass up the opportunity and adventure awaiting me there. I finished both the spring semester and summer school at UW before leaving and arriving at Stanford for the fall quarter. Never to return.
My three years in California were getting my master's degree, a good dependable vehicle for travel, trying to find a lifelong mate, unsuccessfully, and securing an engineering job in quality control. I started taking flights. First to a quality-control conference in LA paid for by the company. And then, home to Wisconsin for three days over Christmas 1967. It was there that I met my cousin's fiancé from Manhattan, where she was a buyer for Macy's. I vowed never to take such a short trip again. Caught a bad cold with the temperature difference between California, 60°, and Wisconsin -20° on the crowded plane flights.
In June, 1968, I flew to Philadelphia where Roger was working at Honeywell, and then, he drove us to NYC for my cousin's wedding. It was a fabulous couple of days, unfortunately shrouded by the death of Bobby Kennedy who was lying at state in St. Patrick's Cathedral. Fortunately, my cousin could not be married there, even though St. Pat's was her school, because he wasn't Catholic. So the wedding had been planned at the Immaculate Conception Cathedral. We rode there in London taxicabs. It was very hot that day. We enjoyed a fabulous wedding dinner off the menu with free drinks at the bride's aunt's garden restaurant, and a night on the town after the wedding. We walked many blocks. Many people were in the street because of the heat. We met one drunk man in Washington Square that wanted to tell us his troubles. We stopped and listened. Went on to Greenwich Village before returning, walking to the motel on the Westside Highway.
But I still hadn't left the country except my excursions into Canada and Mexico as far south as San Felipe on the Baja Peninsula. The only excitement there was being pulled over for turning left on a green light instead of waiting for a green arrow in Mexicali. The young policeman used a basketball whistle to pull me over. He explained to me that I should have waited for the green arrow. I told him I was lost, just looking for the highway south that I had missed at the border.
An older cop appeared and came to my window. Explained in English… "Go to the police station… Pay fine." Traveling on my credit card, I believe I only had less than $25 cash on me. Did not want to end up in a Mexican jail. I persuaded the young cop to let me go. As I drove off slowly, I watched the two of them arguing in the middle of the street, so glad that I was getting away from what could've been a bad situation. My expensive car impounded because I didn't have enough cash to pay the fine.
When I got to San Felipe, it was very windy and hot. Sand was blowing everywhere. Including in the store I stopped at, with a little sand drift across the floor through a crack in the front door. The senorita selling booze was a real beauty, trying to persuade me to stick around that sleepy little fishing town, But I turned around and drove back to the States. I did find a bit of ancient driftwood that I still have as a memento of that trip where I drove over 100 miles an hour through the desert, sometimes leaping depressions that were made in the road for flash floods to cross. Thankfully, for most of the year, it was dry as a bone.
Back teaching at my alma mater in Wisconsin, an enterprising student of mine had bought a Bluebird school bus, painted it blue, replaced the seats with bunks that he welded himself, and returned to school in the fall. I believe he may have lived in that school bus, perhaps with others, at a local campground to avoid paying for a dormitory or a rented room that academic year. Very resourceful and entrepreneurial.
I learned about his plan for spring break that was quite ambitious. He solicited students to pay him something like, $100 each for a weeklong trip to Mexico and back. Ten days in all using the weekends. I think 20 or so students signed up. They drove straight through the first day/night and made it to Mexico, some 1300 miles south of their start. From the border, they drove to the Mexican West Coast and I guess there was some disagreement between the men and women about where they would go--a hotel or stay on the beach. I guess the beach won, probably because of the cost. He told me after they got back that their only bus expense on the trip other than gas and oil was a broken fan belt. Quite an adventure I missed taking. But I don't consider it one of my missed trips. As a faculty member, it would've been frowned upon anyway.
Another spring break trip came up with a student again planning a trip to Italy to explore artwork all around rural Italy, but not in Rome, led by Dr. Orazio Fumagalli, the head of the art department and renowned art historian. He was not at Stout at the time, but he was to be picked up in New York on the way to Italy for the week long tour of churches and museums in small towns that Fumagalli knew and would share the art there with us. Once again, when it came time for the trip, the plane was not full, even though I paid my share, and we did not go. My second missed trip.
During my academic career, combined with job interviews in far-flung places like Pottsdam, New York, the San Fernando Valley and Long Beach, California and MIT in Boston, conferences and other meetings in far-flung places were always on my program. Sometimes, I presented papers like at a world conference in Toronto, but most of the time I just attended and enjoyed the education I got from great minds and travel, like the week I spent in Washington DC, staying at the home of the chapter advisor for the World Future Society and attending the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) I saw Margaret Mead in the hallway, met Carl Sagan at one of the sessions, and had lunch with Robert Wood, former scientific Director of Arecibo, running for Congress in Ohio. Great minds in science and engineering were everywhere.
Another memorable meeting was the 20-20 Space Conference held in Huntsville in 1977 celebrating 20 years of space exploration and looking 20 years into the future. While there, I got a tour where I saw Baker, one of the chimpanzees that went to space, listened to an enlightening keynote address by Hugh Downs in a small room, met some of Warner von Braun's team that launched the first satellite and got us to the Moon, and met a young entrepreneur interested in space commercial development, ahead of Elon Musk by 25 years, but too soon to get funding for his worthy idea of a space company.
Finally, when I was teaching in the Graduate School of Business at Atlanta University, I was interested in a trip offered by Phi Delta Kappa to South America, I believe including Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Santiago, the Amazon in Peru, and finally, a flight to Easter Island. All this for something like $1800. Something happened, I don't remember exactly what, maybe because I started building a house, and that may have been it, but I ended up not taking the trip. That missed trip was my fault. The truth about the mysterious monolithic heads had not been learned yet. Loss of the giant palm trees that made everything possible. They cut down every last one.
At a meeting in Birmingham, I met an Austrian immigrant, Konrad Sadek. Over the years, we cowrote papers and articles together. At one point he went to Vienna and spoke from a paper we wrote on general systems theory. Konrad was working as a computer analyst for the Campus Crusade for Christ. Later he left them, finding their overzealous religious practices not to his liking. We are still in touch by email. I visited him once in Pasadena where he had a business.
There have been planned road trips and cruises since that I didn't take, but only because I couldn't get others to go along with me, especially when I needed their help to make the trip, even though in many cases, with my modified, lowered floor vans, I drove 160,000 miles before giving up driving for good from 1998 to 2015. But we all have to give up the things we love, eventually. That's what aging does. Unless we die on a trip enjoying ourselves.
Copyright 2020 © Ronald W. Hull
7/9/20
