The Five Year Old: “I want to be a physicist”
“Food”
The Son: “A woodworker?”
Growing up hearing my father, Alvin, say he knew he wanted to be a high energy physicist at the age of five always amazed me. Now granted this story may be slightly altered over time. I don’t know if he said at the age of five or he was in the fifth grade. Time can really be the enemy with your memory! I know that when I was five, I did not know what a physicist was let alone know the word. I know that in first grade someone asked me what my father did, and I said “I think he works for the Kellogg cereal company” because he was always going to meeting with the Kellogg group. But in reality, it was just a working group of fellow professors at Caltech’s Kellogg Radiation Lab. It has been a running joke between the two of us, “Carl, what do you want to be when you grow up? I knew I wanted to be a physicist at the age of five.” We both shrugged with the answer, me for not knowing and he for not knowing why I didn’t know! The one thing for sure is that Father wanted to be a physicist very early in his life.
Being the son of a high energy physicist, I did not inherit the skill set needed to master that scientific discipline. In college my physics teacher discovered that my father was a high energy physicist and she had high expectations from me, but I ended up only a solid “C” student. But I did inherit his thirst for knowledge and discovering the unknown. That was the thing about Alvin, every event in life was on opportunity to learn. I worked at Caltech one summer, living in his house while it sold, and he taught me basic electronics. As he traveling back and forth from FNL or BNL and Caltech he would write out an electronics lesson while he was away and send it to me to learn. After work, I would run up to his office/lab to do the lesson and when he got back from his travels, he would review my work. He was a wonderful teacher. I still have that black notebook full of lessons.
I also worked for a summer at Fermilab and after dinner we would retire to his home office and explore the world of physics and math. I had an 18-year career in computers in part because of Father’s influence. One day I went to Caltech with Father and while he was doing some work, he gave me the manual for a DEC PDP 11 computer (mid 1970’s) and said, “go at it”. So away I went learning about computers. Everything when great until I decided to have it print out the value of Pi without a carriage return. Old computers with teletype interfaces do not react well if they get to the end of the carriage without a return command. Later when I worked at Fermilab he taught me the BASIC computer language since he had a modem terminal in his home office connected to computers at the Fermilab. One lesson was creating square waves from Sin waves. Again, always the educator!
Food
Alvin understood the power of food and people. I have many fond memories of big parties at our house in Altadena. And of wonderful smaller parties at his house overlooking the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. Or all the events he had at his homes in Illinois or his small Chicago lake front apartment. In my mid-teens he taught me how to bake a pumpkin pie and a wonderful curry dish that would later be a main staple in my collage days. I always enjoy the process of getting ready for the parties. The attention to detail in the selection of food, the preparation of the food and drink and the greeting of the guest. It didn’t matter if the guest was Nobel Prize winner or a graduate student, or the next-door neighbor, you got the same attention. And I enjoyed the conversation the parties would enlist. And it’s amazing how much Sake can be drunk by 7 visiting Japanese physicist over food and discussions of the future of American and Japanese physics collaboration!
The woodworker
In the fourth grade I got up the nerve to ask my father to help me build a record player cabinet. He was reading the LA Times one Sunday in the back yard and asked him to look at plan for a cabinet I wanted to build. To my surprise he said “Great” and off we when on an adventure as woodworker, father and son. I have to say that woodworking has been one of my great love in life, it brings such joy to my soul. And some of that comes from Alvin. When my father and mother first got married, they needed some furniture. So, using some shipping crates and other wood from the lumber yard he built a lamp table, a record player cabinet and large speaker cabinet. I inherited those pieces and about 16 years ago I reworked them to fit into my home. They have a bit of Father and me in them, two generational work pieces. I also got to work with him on some enhancements to his industrial office furniture at Caltech. His office had your run of the mill steel office furniture and Caltech was not willing to pay for warmer feeling wood furniture. So, he went down to the lumber yard and got some beautiful walnut lumber and we “upgraded” his office furniture. We build a wood desktop, bookshelves, and large reading table. I really value the time we spent in the shop building those things. Later when we cleared out his stuff from Caltech, after he moved to Fermilab, I inherited the left-over walnut lumber from that project. I kept that wood for years and since 2004 I have been incorporating little bits of that walnut wood in every woodworking project I have done. So, most of my woodworking projects have a little bit of Alvin in them as a reminder of the time we spent working in the woodshop.
Thank you for being a teacher, a cook and woodworker.
Carl Tollestrup, October, 2020