Church Attendance

During the time from late 1946 until 1953 when I married Jean, I attended rather irregularly the Bethany Lutheran Church in Berkeley. When I left southern California I had transferred my church membership back to the church in Gowrie but I later transferred it to Bethany. I also participated in the young persons group though also somewhat irregularly. It was when I was at an evening meeting of the group at the church that my car was the victim of the hit/run accident. During this period my attitude toward Christianity and the Lutheran church was sort of hit or miss, up and down but one way or another I generally didn’t consider it too seriously until there was a conflict between Jean and me between Christian Science and the more conventional churches.

In retrospect I think the conflict served to weaken further my already declining regard for conventional Christianity, and for church personnel. This would apply both to such groups as Christian Science but even more so eventually to the older parts of the Christian establishment.

After our marriage Jean and I sort of went our separate ways as far as church was concerned until after Muriel was old enough to start Sunday School. In the interest of some kind of family commitment in common for her background Jean and I agreed to start attending the Methodist church in north Berkeley. As I recall we looked at various churches, including Presbyterian, Unitarian as well as other but finally settled on Epworth. I transferred my membership from Bethany but Jean has never joined after letting her membership as a Christian Scientist lapse. In a way I suppose she had a stronger allegiance to Christian Science than I had to any organized religion, so she made a more significant adjustment than I did.

Actually, Jean’s family on her mother’s side had a historical connection to the Methodist church, some of them being as I recall founding members of one of the churches there. One of the reasons for selecting Epworth was the minister then in charge there. His name was Paul Getty and he was a philosopher as well as a minister. Unfortunately he left after a couple of years later at the conclusion of a building program.

Amongst his successors was Max Brown, who though not a philosopher, was an individual I recall with real affection. He was a most warm and likable individual and his sermons were such that I would listen to them — something I seldom do any more. There was another feature of Epworth that was highly in its favor. Located as it was in north Berkeley, it had as members several of the faculty of the Pacific School of Religion. they were certainly a leavening influence on the quality of the religious scene at Epworth and of the classes which were held on Sunday mornings.

The association that Jean and I had with Epworth and later on in Houston at Memorial Drive Methodist Church, delayed I think my retreat from involvement with religion and the church. I’m quite sure that had it not have been for this compromise in the interest of our daughters that my status now would be much less than it actually is — rather low though it may be. Currently we attend the Methodist church here once a month on the day I act as an usher. That attendance, plus the contribution we make, and the occasional attendance at some other event is about the sum of activity for me.

When we first arrived in Ashland we used the church as a basis for establishing various social contacts and we were quite active in attendance and in participation in such groups as the “Merry-mates” — a dinner group for married couple. This participation has gradually declined, partly as a result of a pastor who came to serve the congregation whose ritualistic tendency and lack of interesting discourse was not to the liking of either Jean or me.

Jean has continued her participation in such “old ladies” groups as UMW — I guess partly because of her liking for such persons. For awhile I attended the monthly suppers of the men’s group but haven’t now for several years. Several factor caused this decision. First I was “hooked” into being a caller to find out who was going to attend the meetings and I resented being asked to do something that I was not interested in doing. Further I have gradually become averse to after-dark activities, particularly in the winter months, preferring instead a quiet evening of reading or watching TV at home. But what really caused my decline of interest was the gradual feeling of lack of stimulation from the persons attending, despite their general friendliness and the usually tasty quality of the church-cooked suppers. During the time we have lived here in Ashland, only Laurel has spent much time actually living here and her lack of interest in any church activities probably contributed to our diminution of interest in the church.

In later life it is only Laurel, however, who has shown much inclination to establish an attendance relationship with a church. We have actually attended, with her, Mike and Lillian, the church in Seattle that she had chosen. It was the Easter service and we also participated in the Easter breakfast.

Palma and Dave have mentioned the possibility of some affiliation with such a group as the Unitarian church, but nothing has come of it and the arrival of our grandson may have delayed any plan they may have considered. Muriel has no contacts generally, though over the year she has gone back occasionally to either Epworth or the Christian Science church in Berkeley.

We have visited Epworth a few times over the years — its tenor is quite different now ans I suspect that we would not fit in as well as we did in the ’50s and ’60s. It seems to be still a well-functioning organization. I think this is partly because of its location with is well away from downtown Berkeley. The Christian Science church which Jean attended for many years has been less fortunate. It’s in an area that no longer provides the potential membership it once had. Either there has been a move to the suburbs of its previous members and this has caused a decline in its membership or the character of the Berkeley population has changed. It still functions but what the future holds for it remains to be seen The structure is an architectural gem and it is sad to see its deterioration. Recently (about 2004) Jean was contacted by a group that was trying to get funds to fix up the structure and I believe that Jean made a contribution.

Automobile Ownership

After I finished in the fractionation group, I started in the research group headed up by Dick Olney as supervisor which gradually developed into the group doing chemical engineering research along several different lines. The experimental work was done either at the Emeryville laboratories (where the test column for investigating tray hydraulics was located) or at the Berkeley lab. The latter was involved both in instrumentation research and in chemical engineering research. As the testing program developed, I spent less and less time in San Francisco and eventually, when the whole engineering department was transferred to Emeryville my contact with the San Francisco scene ended. But I remember with nostalgia those days which were marked as I’ve mentioned with a kind of youthful exuberance.

It was during the time I started spending more time in Emeryville that I made a change in residence from Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley to Grove Street in Oakland. My new room was close enough to the Emeryville lab that I could walk to it — I suppose the distance was a mile or two. The accommodation I had was really two rooms — an inside bedroom and an unheated outside sun room. It was a very pleasant accommodation but I shared the bathroom with two sons of the family (both post-college age) and another roomer who like me worked for Shell.

The family’s name was Reymann. Mr. Reymann’s first wife had died and he had remarried, a plump, cheerful widow. I’m not sure after all these years but I think I had breakfasts there at the house. Some of these were ones that I prepared for myself but on weekends Mrs. Reymann may have made them for me. I know for sure that I would often have suppers with the family on weekends. It was during one of the Friday evening suppers that I first encountered cracked crab — the Reymann family was Catholic and observed the old-time restriction of no red meat on Fridays.

It was what I have come to regard as a typical run-of-the-mill Catholic family. Fairly strict attendance at mass, not eating meat on Fridays, some sort of special penitence during Lent (but only outwardly) but a far from punctilious attention to personal behavior and honesty. The usual church-sponsored attitude of lenience on behavior on a social scale and emphasis on church-dictated dogma and conduct even if only in a superficial way. A sort of pro forma life regime that could be and often was a church-approved lack of real commitment on a personal level.

It was during my residence at the Reymanns’ that I really started to have a car continuously. While I was living in San Pedro I actually had at one time or another the ownership of two cars. The order in which I had them I can’t recall now. My ownership of the two may have overlapped. One was an old sedan (I don’t remember the make now) that had been the Johnson family car but which had been sitting in the garage unused to a long time, ever since Mr. Johnson could no longer drive because of his Parkinson’s. For some reason it was offered to me and I bought it, but I was never able to get it started and of course never drove it. I seem to recall getting a new battery, all to no avail. I finally disposed of it tp another young engineer at Shell — he came and towed it away. Whatever he did with it I have no idea.

The other car was a Model A Ford coupe which I had I suppose for a year or so until I had an accident with it and disposed of it to a junkyard. I suppose that I could have had it repaired but I think it would have been rather expensive and not worth it. The accident occurred while I was driving to work. At one point I had to make a left turn against the oncoming traffic at a signal. Usually I could wait until the traffic coming just stopped as the signal changed and I’d complete the turn that I had started. On this occasion the other car tried to get through just as the light was turning red for them and ran into me as I was turning.

Anyway sometime in 1948 I bought a maroon 4-door Chevrolet at a used car lot in Berkeley. New cars even then were hard to come by. As it turned out the car had had really hard usage and was a “lemon” and I traded it in on a green 4-door Chevrolet, a new car this time and I had it for quite some time (actually I had it for two periods, at an intermediate I had sold it to the Rosels who used it as a school commute car for Ralph and Deryl and I bought it back when they no longer had a use for it).

This car had the misfortune of being run into when it was parked outside the Bethany Lutheran Church on University Avenue in Berkeley one evening. It was a hit-and-run accident and I never found out who was involved. The left rear fender was rather badly crumpled and I think the trunk was slightly sprung though still usable. I decided to fix the car myself and I enrolled in a body-shop class at Berkeley High School The result was certainly not professional but it passed muster during the rest of the time I owned the car. During the time I lived at the Reymanns’ I arranged to park it in the one-car garage that the Reymanns had. The driveway was occasionally used by the sons of the family for parking their cars which made it a little inconvenient for me.

Alongside the Reymanns’ lot was a vacant lot, belonging I think to the Children’s hospital which was located just back of the Reymanns’ house. Somewhere I picked up some Indian corn seeds and I dug up a little patch of ground in the vacant lot and grew some Indian corn. As I recall my effort was not particularly successful and the ears I grew were not very colorful. I suppose my doing so showed my continuing interest in things horticultural and agricultural.

Contract Bridge

It was during this early period that I became acquainted with the game of bridge — by kibitzing the games that invariably went on during the noon hour. During my basic data days the bridge foursome included Charlie Hurd and one John Valentine, the other two being variable. In the fractionation group Sarno and Shiras always played, Jarman often with a fourth member a fill-in. This game continued after the move to Emeryville and then the fourth was one Kunstman, a younger engineer.

Following the conclusion of the actual playing there was often an extensive rehash of the hands that had been played. Shiras would defend his playing, which was often queer and erratic, and I recall that Kunstman was almost lived in his assessment of Shiras’ playing. I’ve often wondered how much of Shell’s time was absorbed and wasted in these post-game discussions.

When I started kibitzing was when honor count was the way used to evaluate a hand — it was only later that Goren’s point came into favor. But it was through watching these noontime games that my knowledge of the game developed and my liking of it as a card game.

After Jean and I were married I participated occasionally in the Shell tournaments sponsored by the Shell Development Recreational association. I recall playing in these with Jean as a partner, and also with Dwight Johnston. The latter was actually in a tournament outside of Shell and we actually garnered a few master-points. I believe I have them tucked away somewhere as a memento of the evening. I’m sure that they will not be joined by any further master-points.

Although I like to play bridge it is just that — “play” and not the serious business that really avid players make of it. For one thing, although I have a fair idea of the conventions as to bidding, I lack the fine points and do not have the experience to cope with unusual situations or to make lead-indicating signals in the bidding process. My technique on the play of a hand, either as a declarer or defensively, is even more fragmentary and my ability to keep a count as to what has been played in the course of the play of a hand is quite limited. Thus a substantial fraction of the time I bid and play is sort of by intuition.

All of this is in part I think, the result of the kind of bridge I was trained in initially — the Shell noontime contests. The level of bidding and play there were pretty much on the level of my bridge-playing skills. Always present at the Shell games was a considerable level of psychological play (almost as in poker) and this was the result of the players involved and the relationships between them. There was also the factor that the payers were acquainted with the type of play characteristics of the other players so that in certain situations the play was dictated not so much by the rules of the game but by the knowledge of what the players would do in certain situations. Typically there was as much glee expressed when an opponent succumbed to a psychological ploy as when the technically correct play was done. All of this rubbed off on me so that my type of play is suitable for friendly non-competitive situations but not where the level of play is serious.

In Ashland Jean and I used to play once a week or so with a couple from church who lived nearby. Their level of play (particularly of the husband) was similar to Jean’s and mine; the lady’s was somewhat erratic. These were pleasant social evenings but they were discontinued when Jean developed difficulty with going to sleep after them. Since then we tended to keep our evenings quiet and peaceful. Even the kind of social contact involved with an evening of bridge and table conversation was to be avoided if Jean was to be able to get to sleep easily afterward.

For awhile I also played duplicate bridge with an Ashland acquaintance, Colver Anderson. This was in a league that had a regular Friday session of play at Ashland’s recreation department hall. It was congenial enough and we continued to participate until a hand occurred in which an opponent objected to my bidding as not following bid conventions. It was a hand of somewhat unusual character so I had had to compromise in what I bid. The opponent called the tournament director over to review the situation. No action was taken but the whole episode left a very bad impression on men and I told Colver that I was not interested in continuing. Since then I don’t think I have played bridge at all.

Co-Workers in San Francisco

During the time I was in San Francisco I was always in a room with a group of other engineers. Initially when I first started and was working on basic data, I was in a large room with such colorful figures as Charlie Hurd (who alter on when computers came into use did some of the early programming in machine language, rather than Fortran, the early symbolic language), Cline Black who became the expert of correlating phase equilibria and who eventually had the capability of predicting the whole range of properties of compounds and mixtures from a few scattered literature or Shell data (useful in screening evaluations, etc.), Chandler Barkelew, who was one of the first people I actually worked for in San Francisco, and Werden Waring who introduced me to the delightful world of Pogo.

Later on when I was going through the fractionation training I was in a smaller office with Cornell Jarman and Don Hanson. Cornell was an accounting major by training but had been in the early fractionation design group at Wilmington (before my time there) I guess because of his computing skills and remained in that group for his whole Shell career. Don was a PhD who later left Shell and joined the chemical engineering faculty at UCB, where he had a distinguished career. On one occasion he had a sore back and was having a back massage by Cornell while lying on a table in the room They had locked the door to the hallway to avoid interruption. While the massage was going on, someone tried the door noisily, left but then came in through an unguarded door to the adjacent office. It was Bill (A.J.) Johnson the chief engineer. What the outcome of this episode was, Don never told me.

The fractionation group was headed up jointly by Dan Sarno and Russ Shiras. They had developed some of the early fractionation calculation methods that Shell used. The group had actually started at Wilmington but had been moved to the San Francisco office some time prior to my arrival there. The group had been headed by Mott Souders (more about him later). Both Sarno and Shiras were real characters, particularly Shiras. Sarno had never finished college — he had going to Cal Tech. Perhaps because of the Depression. He was the more capable of the two, but somewhat opinionated and tending to be “ivory tower” in his approach to operating problems. Both were inveterate smokers of cigarettes, Sarno having a long black filter holder for his cigarettes.

Shiras was a man with a craggy mobile face that often mirrored his mood of the minute. Generally he was unkempt, with his long hair frequently uncombed. He would keep brushing it back out of his eyes, rather ineffectually. He had a moustache. As to dress he was always rather disheveled. He appeared to wear pants that were too small for his ungainly frame. He always wore a vest and a suit coat that could never be buttoned properly because it like his pants was too small. His hands were large and knobby and his shoes were as a rule unpolished.

His training was as a mathematician and I surmise that this was what he was originally hired for. He and his wife were of the Catholic persuasion and I believe that they had a large family as a result. I think I recall that his wife was a writer, detective fiction. But underneath his appearance he was a rather kindly person, more likable to me than Sarno. I think his recreation was reading and I think he did it voraciously and widely. I never met any of his family. I believe that Shiras accepted Catholicism but I often wondered how anyone as widely read as he was could give the faith much credence. Shiras retired before the move to Houston so he passed out of my life. We’ve kept up with Sarno over the years, at least with Christmas cards. I don’t think he took the transfer to Houston, perhaps retiring a little early.

Extracurricular Athletic Activities

There were other activities generated by being part of the Shell scene in San Francisco. There was a Shell bowling league and I participated in this. It was at an alley called the Broadway Bowl (I suppose it was out on Broadway). After work we would ride the street car out, what day of the week I have no idea now. Whether we’d eat some supper before the bowling I can’t really remember, though it seems dimly that we did.

Part of the cost for the bowling was allocated towards prizes or prize money and I used this on one occasion to purchase a softball glove. This I used in another sport activity — that of the engineering department softball team. I wasn’t a very competent performer but the whole league of Shell teams was pretty low key. Like when I played softball as a child in junior high in Gowrie I was always out in the outfield where my performance was least critical.

The games were typically on Saturday mornings at some school yard in south Berkeley. The engineering department had a pretty good record because it had one very good pitcher — one Merle Gould. As I recall the team captured the title in the SDRA (Shell Development Recreational Association) competition more than once.

My good friend Hugh Guthrie was the catcher for the team, an effective partner in the pitcher/catcher combination. Long after I no longer participated in these softball games (which I seem to recall sort of swindled out of existence), I still had the softball glove I’d purchased with the bowling prize money. I think I finally gave it to one of the Piehl boys — Jean had met their mother Lucille in the Alta Bates hospital when Muriel was being born and Lucille was having their oldest child. We kept up with them for occasional family visits for a long time, I guess until we moved to Houston or they moved to Napa to reside.

Later on, after I was married I used to participate in the Shell league at the Albany bowl. Somewhere along the line I bought some bowling shoes, but I did not go so far as to buy my own bowling ball as some of the Shell leaguers did. After I had totally given up bowling, I guess after we moved to Ashland, Jean was noticing the boxes of unused shoes and they were disposed of. Where they went I don’t recall or perhaps never knew.

Another “sporting” event that I participated in was the weekly football pool in the engineering department. I think it was Dick Olney who chose and handicapped the games (only college games as I recall). Dick had been at Iowa when I was but he was a year ahead of me. He was there as a grad student during my senior year. I had a lot of contact with him during the San Francisco and Emeryville uears as he was the supervisor I worked under.

Dick was a very capable engineer but for some reason he didn’t really “click” with the Shell organization and never moved to a higher position than supervisor. Sometime before the move to Houston he became disenchanted with Shell and the increasingly liberal scene in Berkeley and moved to a conservative section of Orange County. I haven’t heard from him in years. although occasionally I get individual reports from mutual acquaintances who live in southern California and have encountered him. I do know from the obituary list in the AIChE magazine that he died at the age of about 83.

He married one of the secretaries at Shell and they had one child, Norma, who is I believe lawyer. In his later years, Olney was a teacher in one of the colleges on San Diego, but he never worked for a company like Shell after he left them.

My knowledge of football was pretty sketchy but as luck would have it I did win the engineering department football pool once. I think I got $10 or so. To enter the pool one had to contribute 25 cents.