CHARLIE MINER, R.I.P. | Vero Beach and East Hampton

Charlie Miner (R) enjoying his great-nephew and great-great-
niece and her (unrelated) Angry Bird. (Photo by JT Marlin.) 

March 20, 2018 – Charlie Miner interrupted his studies at Princeton (Class of 1943) to sign up with the U.S. Army Air Forces.

He served in Europe as pilot of a B-25 bomber.

He died yesterday, according to his daughter, and Vero Beach resident, Charmaine Caldwell.

A memorial service in Vero Beach is planned for May 3 and another one in the summer in East Hampton. 

The following is a slightly edited version of an article I wrote about Miner for The Vero Portfolio, May-June 2015 issue, p. 24. The ending is, of course, updated.

Charlie Miner was one of seven grandchildren of his illustrious grandfather, FDR’s first Treasury Secretary, Will Woodin. His mother was Woodin's eldest daughter, Mary, who married an infantry captain, Robert Charles (Charlie) Miner, Sr., grandson of famed anti-slavery Federalist Congressman Charles Miner. 

Miner divided his time at the end of his life between Vero Beach and East Hampton until his cousin and constant companion Anne Gerli died in 2016. 

He was born in New York City in 1921 and prepared for college at Buckley School and Choate. At Princeton he studied engineering and joined the war effort as pilot of a B-25 Mitchell twin-engine bomber, which had a crew of three or more. Miner flew many of the 18 bombing missions of his squadron over northern Italy. [More about his contribution to the war effort here.]

He was lucky to have survived. Of 16 million American veterans of World War II, fewer than one in 16 were alive in 2015, only 80,000 in Florida. That year Miner was one of only about 250 World War II vets left in Indian River County, when he may have been Indian River County's oldest surviving European-theater WWII bomber pilot.

Miner told me how much he loves Vero Beach. Years ago in the 1950s and 1960s, he spent time with his mother (who divorced Charlie Sr. and did not remarry) in the Riomar social life. It  revolved, he said, around rotating dinners and celebrations among the original 12 houses. The 30 residents took turns throwing parties. The Riomar clubhouse facilities came later. John's Island—where Miner and his late wife Maisie lived—opened in 1970 and he said was at first resented because it drew people away from Riomar (and then became successful, and was imitated by the Moorings).

Charlie Miner’s grandfather, Will Woodin, was the man who dealt with the Wall Street and banking panic that started in 1929 and was not put to rest until FDR came into office in March 1933. FDR's first Treasury Secretary was given wide latitude in addressing the problem. 

Will Woodin was born in Pennsylvania and settled in New York after a successful career as the CEO of a huge business selling railroad rolling stock. He had four children. The eldest and youngest settled in Vero Beach — Mary Woodin Miner and Libby Woodin Rowe. Libby’s husband, Wally Rowe, and a brother bought homes in Riomar. Mary and Libby eventually lived in Vero Beach most of the year. Charlie’s mother lived in John's Island after Riomar and died in 2007 at 102.

Charlie remembers not just the bridge that connected the two sides of the Indian River, "Beachland Boulevard" where Route 60 crosses, before the concrete-arch Barber Bridge.  He remembers the drawbridge that was built earlier, in 1995. Before that, back in the 1930s, there was a bridge made of wooden railroad ties and swung around horizontally to let boats through the Indian River. 

Charlie (R) and me in 2014. Photo by
Alice Tepper Marlin.

Back in those early days Beachland Boulevard was the northern edge of Vero Beach, and there wasn’t a Riverside Theater. Charlie says the money was raised in several ways. Rosie and Sterling Adams organized a dance every year. He and his cousin, Bill Rowe, used to sell season tickets and organized an auction of donated prizes to raise money for the theater. The Theater is, of course, now a central  institution in Vero, contiguous to the Vero Museum of Art.

What Charlie Miner liked about Vero is that it is quiet. That was one of the original motivations of the developers, along with the availability of rail transportation and ocean beaches. There is no strip with night clubs, no airport. As Charlie says, “I’m not a teenager anymore.”

Charlie’s Advice at 93 for a Long and Happy Life:

For a Long Life: Every morning a meal of two eggs and tomato juice or V-8 (with or without the hair of the dog). 

For a Happy Life: “Enjoy life while you can. If you want to do something, don’t wait. Do it while you can because life goes by quickly. You may never get another chance.” He says his years have “Gone… Boom!”

During the many recent years that I have been studying and writing about FDR's forgotten first Treasury Secretary, Charlie's grandfather, I and my wife Alice have been amused and impressed by Charlie's joie-de-vivre and his sharp recollections of his long life. It was a sad moment when I learned of his death, just two months after he celebrated his 96th birthday.

Postscript, May 3, 2018: The East Hampton Star just published my "Guest Words" on the passing of Charlie Miner, remembering him and others who have bravely faced the guns of Adolf Hitler.

BIRTH | May 11–Richard Feynman

Richard Feynman

This day in 1918 was born physicist Richard Phillips Feynman in Queens, N.Y. He went to New York City public schools. He was rejected by Columbia because his admission would have exceeded the Jewish quota of the time. 

Instead of Columbia, he went to MIT and then completed his doctorate at Princeton. He won the Nobel Prize in 1965 and is rated one of the greatest ten theoretical physicists of all time. 

He worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the nuclear bomb, and he was the youngest group leader in the project's theoretical division. When the first test bomb was detonated in 1945, he was excited and happy, but as soon as Germany ceased to be a threat to the world, he questioned his own work on the bomb. 

He made enormous contributions to the field of quantum mechanics. Feynman diagrams are now fundamental for string theory and M-theory, The world-lines of the diagrams have developed to become tubes to allow better modeling of more complicated objects such as strings and membranes. But shortly before his death, Feynman criticized string theory in an interview that is frequently quoted by critics of the theory: 

I don't like that they're not calculating anything. I don't like that they don't check their ideas. I don't like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation—a fix-up to say, "Well, it still might be true."

He enjoyed his work and tried to convey the joys of physics to lay people. He said:

• The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. 
• Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. 
• Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it. 

He was married three times, the third time for 28 years until his death on February 15, 1988, in Los Angeles. He is survived by a son Karl and a daughter Michelle Louise.

Video (TED talk): https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_feynman

PORTSMOUTH | Abbey at Vero Beach

I had the pleasure of seeing again on Monday several fellow Portsmouth Abbey alumni at a lunch at the Moorings in Vero Beach, Fla.

They included, in the photo above, Jim Mulholland '79, former Portsmouth Headmaster Gregory Floyd '57 (a year before me) and the current Headmaster and math teacher, Daniel McDonough.

We had a good turnout of nearly 30 people for a small community where only 16,000 people live - i.e., just one in 20,000 U.S. residents. However, the intake to the lunch came from quite a wide swath of Florida.

The lunch made me think about the headmaster (and great teacher) who took over at Portsmouth in 1957, the beginning of my senior year. He came in to his Physics 2 class–I think there were four of us sitting in a row – in the first week and announced that he had been made headmaster and was quite clear about not being happy about it. I have posted about him here.

Dragonboat Racing

Susan Rittenhouse, Wellesley
'66, with a racing shirt.

 The Wellesley Class of 1966 had a mini reunion in East Hampton hosted by Joan Hass and my wife Alice Tepper Marlin.

One of the participants in the event was Susan Rittenhouse, who was getting ready with other "senior warriors" to participate in a Dragonboat Race in Europe later this month.

That's her at left with one of the shirts she wears as a dragonboat racer.

Dragonboat with full complement of 20 paddlers, drummer and steerer.

Some of the 22 teammates required for a Dragonboat.

The boat has a drummer at front and a steerer - someone who wields an oar at the back to steer with, much like a gondolier.

The paddlers are in ten rows of two per row. The lead paddler in front of the drummer maintains the pace and the drummer follows the rhythm that the lead paddler establishes.

Susan recently participated the Nine Annual  Dragonboat Festival on Lake Champlain, at Burlington's Waterfront Park. There were 64 slots. Each team has 21 paddlers and a drummer who "race" over a 200-meter course. 

For her group it was not a race but rather an exhibition of local community and corporate teams, many of which are new to the sport and trained during a practice weekend in July. 

The Festival was a fund-raiser for Survivorship NOW, a cancer wellness program that is free service initiated by Dragonheart VT. It includes courses in subjects like yoga, art, finance, fitness and nutrition available to all cancer survivors in Vermont.

Dragonheart VT will have at least four teams (including two Senior teams 60+) representing the USA at the World Club Dragonboat Championships in Italy. The teams are setting off  on August 30. 

This is a sport that older paddlers can compete in because technique and teamwork have a lot to do with winning. Susan told me that her team of mature paddlers has defeated boats with much younger competitors.

There is a camp at Melbourne, Fla., and races are held in places like Princeton, NJ and Montreal. The festivals and races raise money for charity such as breast cancer research. Winning boats travel to Europe and Asia to compete.

Participants in one of the many dragon boat races.

Closer to home in NYC, the Hong Kong Dragonboat Festival in Queens last week drew nearly 200 teams in dragon-headed boats. They race across Meadow Lake in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.

The all-female team known as the Dragon Queens competes in a variety of heats during the two-day festival.

The first day includes a competition for the Municipal Cup — a co-ed race for NY City agencies. The winning boat in this race is usually the NY State Chinese Auxiliary Police Association. The Dragon Queens were hoping before the race to come in second.

June 17 - The Ironic Origins of the SAT (with Comment)

The national office of the College Board, founded in
1900. The office is at 45 Columbus Avenue, NYC.

The following was posted this morning by Garrison Keillor on Writer's Almanac:

It was on this day in 1901 that the first standardized tests were administered by the College Board. Before standardized tests, many universities had their own college entrance exams, and prospective students were required to come to campus for a week or more to take exams. 

Since each college's exam demanded a different set of knowledge, high schools offered separate instruction for students based on which colleges they hoped to attend. Some colleges accepted applicants based on how well previous graduates of the same high school were doing at the college. Other colleges sent faculty to visit high schools, and if the high school met their criteria, then they would admit any graduate of that school. 

It was a confusing system, and as more Americans began to attend college, it was no longer practical. Between 1890 and 1924, the number of college students grew five times faster than the growth of the general population. In 1885, the principal of a prestigious boarding school wrote to the National Education Association asking them to reform the system. It took 15 years of discussion, committees, and arguments, but the College Board was finally formed in 1900. Its founders hoped to simplify curricula at the high schools, and make a college education accessible to a wider pool of applicants.  

Beginning today and throughout this week in 1901, the first standardized college entrance exams were given to 973 students at 67 locations (plus two more in Europe). More than a third of the students were from New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Students were tested in English, French, German, Latin, Greek, history, mathematics, chemistry, and physics. The tests were essays, not multiple choice, read by a team of experts in each subject. The experts met at tables in the library of Columbia University, and the essays were graded as Excellent, Good, Doubtful, Poor, or Very Poor. 

Columbia was one of the main forces behind the conversion to standardized testing — of the 973 applicants, 758 were applying to either Columbia or its affiliate Barnard. For the next couple of decades, the tests were in use but were not widely accepted. Only a small fraction of incoming freshmen took standardized tests, and there were only 10 colleges that admitted all of their students based on the test — some colleges looked at the test, but also provided their own entrance exams, and happily admitted students of any qualifications if their parents were donors. 

The early tests were considered "achievement" tests because they tested for students' proficiency in certain subjects. A couple of decades later, the College Board switched to "aptitude" tests, intended to measure intelligence. There were mixed motives for this change. On the surface, it made college admittance more fair and accessible to students whose high schools didn't teach ancient Greek or prepare students specifically for college. 

But the biggest proponents of intelligence testing were college officials who were concerned about the rapid influx of immigrants — especially Eastern European Jews — to their student body. A Columbia University dean worried that the high numbers of recent immigrants and their children would make the school "socially uninviting to students who come from homes of refinement," and its president described the 1917 freshman class as "depressing in the extreme," lamenting the absence of "boys of old American stock." 

These college officials believed that immigrants had less innate intelligence than old-blooded Americans, and hoped that they would score lower on aptitude tests, which would give the schools an excuse to admit fewer of them. In 1925, the College Board began to use a new, multiple-choice test, designed by a Princeton psychology professor named Carl Brigham, who had modeled it on his work with Army intelligence tests. This new test was known as the Scholastic Aptitude Test. The first SAT was taken in 1926. These days, more than 1.6 million students take the SAT each year.

Comment

When I applied in 1955 for transfer to an American high school from one in England, I was required to take the high-school equivalent of the SAT. No surprisingly, I was the only person at my school taking it. My examiner, Fr. Timothy Horner (who subsequently came to the United States and headed up St. Louis Priory), relished the instructions, which were intended for huge halls of examinees. "All students will now pick up their pencils in their right hand. At the signal, all students will break the seal on the exam booklet and will begin answering the questions."

Garrison Keillor doesn't say it, but the irony is that the SAT tests showed that the undesired immigrants were highly intelligent. The alumni-children legacy preference continued, but I am told that official records show that it was not available for alumni children applying for scholarships. The idea seems to have been that if Harvard's continuance is partly dependent on wealthy donors, those that cannot afford to send their children without financial aid are not part of the relevant population.

Today, the highly intelligent applicants for whom an alleged quota exists at top universities are reportedly (see my letter of 2012) those whose parents immigrated from Korea, or those applying directly from Korea. In Korea, educational achievement is highly valued, and Harvard is a top brand.

October 17 - Einstein Moved to the USA

Einstein, 1921

In 1933 on this day, Albert Einstein officially moved to the USA to teach at Princeton University.

A German-Swiss physicist and Nobel laureate, Einstein is best known for his special and general theories of relativity and for his bold hypothesis concerning the particle nature of light. He is widely viewed as the most famous scientist of the 20th century. He was born in Ulm, Württemberg, in March 1879.

As a youth in Munich, he showed an intense curiosity about nature and an ability to understand difficult mathematical concepts. In high school, he excelled in mathematics but failed utterly in the classics. At 16 Einstein moved away from his family to Switzerland, where his good performance in mathematics barely got him into a technical college in Zurich. He did not enjoy it and skipped most lectures, preferring to play his violin or to study physics in the library. He graduated in 1900 but his professors did not recommend him for a place in university. Instead, he secured a junior position in the patent office at Bern. In the year 1905 he published four papers, for which the year is named the "annus mirabilis":

1. The first paper, published June 9, dealt with the photoelectric effect and the nature of light; applying Planck's quantum theory, which had been proposed five years earlier and was quietly forgotten. The paper, "On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light", proposed the idea of energy quanta. This paper won him the Nobel Prize in physics 16 years later.

2. The second article, published July 18, "On the Motion of Small Particles Suspended in a Stationary Liquid, as Required by the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat", offered a stochastic model of Brownian motion.

3. His third paper, published September 26, was “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” and had the most profound effect on modern physics. It contained Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. Einstein proposed that it was meaningless to speak of one body moving and another body being still. Bodies can only be thought of as moving in relationship to each other. All motion is relative to some frame of reference, and the laws of nature apply unchanged, whatever that frame of reference. In particular, this means that the speed of electromagnetic radiation (such as light) is always the same, no matter the frame of reference. In subsequent years, results predicted on the basis of his theory were confirmed over and over again, and the Special Theory of Relativity eventually revolutionized how scientists viewed matter, space, time and all the things that interact with them. 

4.On November 21, 1905, Annalen der Physik published a fourth paper, ("Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?"), in which Einstein developed an argument for arguably the most famous equation in the field of physics: E = mc². 

In 1909 Einstein was given a chair in theoretical physics in Switzerland, but he returned to Germany five years later to take up a specially created post as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute in Berlin, where he developed his General Theory of Relativity, recognizing that mass and energy are two sides of the same coin, leading to the famous formula E=mc2. The new theory made bold predictions about the interaction of light and gravity that had not yet been observed and which were at variance with Newtonian physics.

After the war ended, in 1919, scientists used a total eclipse of the sun to confirm that light from distant stars was indeed deflected as it passed through the influence of the sun's gravity, exactly as General Relativity predicted. Einstein became internationally renowned.

When Hitler took over as chancellor in 1933, he had been in California working as a visiting professor. Einstein's apartment in Berlin and his summer cottage in the country were raided, his papers confiscated, and his bank accounts closed.

Einstein was smart enough to get the message right away that he was unwelcome. He returned to Europe and handed in his German passport. He considered many offers, from places like Paris, Istanbul and Oxford, eventually deciding on Princeton, which offered him an attractive package teaching at its Institute for Advanced Study.

He had hesitations about Princeton. It had a secret quota system allowing only a small percentage of the incoming class to be Jewish. The Institute's director, Abraham Flexner, was worried that Einstein would be too directly involved in Jewish refugee causes, so he micromanaged Einstein's public appearances, trying to keep him out of the public eye. He even declined an invitation for Einstein to see FDR at the White House without telling the scientist. When Einstein found out, he personally called Eleanor Roosevelt and arranged for a visit anyway, and then complained about the incident in a letter to a rabbi friend of his, giving the return address as "Concentration Camp, Princeton."

In 1938, incoming freshmen at Princeton ranked Einstein as the second-greatest living person. First place went to Adolf Hitler.

(Thanks to Garrison Keillor and the Writer's Almanac, from which this is mostly adapted.)