ABOUT MY FATHER

Hallowe’en was always a happy holiday in our house because it was also my father’s birthday. Costumes, trick-or-treating, all that candy - plus cake, ice cream, and rousing choruses of “Happy Birthday to You!” What could be better?
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The following entry is adapted from a piece I wrote two years ago to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his birth, October 31, 1914. The original article appears elsewhere on this website but I am reposting it here on his birthday for those readers who are only here for the blog, and because some things bear repeating. For my fellow lovers of vintage photos, I have added several of my dad and his family.

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My dad with his maternal grandparents. Chasing butterflies with his granddad was one of his few childhood memories.

It was hard to get my father to talk about his childhood. Even when I conducted an oral history interview with him, I had to probe repeatedly to elicit much in the way of detail. I think he was one of those people who truly don’t remember their childhoods in the same vivid detail as I do. Questions about where he came from were usually met with his stock response, “I’m a native of where I’m living now.” Still, though many of the puzzle pieces are missing, I think I have managed to learn a bit about his formative years.  

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Photo of Beatrice King and Edwin Stodola, from a brochure showing them in performance.

Both his parents were artists. My grandfather was a classical pianist who studied with the American composer and pianist Henry Holden Huss and concertized for a living until the advent of the radio reduced the demand for live performance and he was reduced to supporting his family doing clerical work. My grandmother was a ​professional elocutionist and actress - diseuse is the technical term - who also painted and wrote poetry and plays. I picture their household as resembling the Alcotts’, with a succession of visits by artists and intellectuals. How surprised they must have been by their eldest son’s strong bent for math and science. But apparently they took it in their stride and encouraged him to follow his lights where they led him.

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Beatrice holding King, age 11 weeks.

King, around age 4.

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Edwin with King and his younger brothers, Quentin and Sid, and their dog Sandy.

Beatrice with King, Sid, and Quentin.

An early affinity deserving of special mention is amateur radio, which was encouraged by what hams call an "Elmer," a neighborhood hobbyist who taught him the ropes. At the time when he received his license - I guess he was around 12? - he was the youngest person ever to do so. Of course, records are made to be broken, and many younger children have since been licensed. ​

Radio Club at Brooklyn Tech. I believe my dad 2nd from left (1st in the front row).

My dad used this photo on his QSL card.

My father attended Brooklyn Technical High School and then the Cooper Union, an engineering and art school noted at the time for being highly selective and (importantly) tuition-free. He made many lifelong friendships during this era, both at school and among the Unitarians whose meetings he attended (in preference to the Episcopalian church to which his mother belonged). Even then he understood that friendships need nourishment if they are to last. I think particularly of his high school classmate Carl Dworak - of the efforts they made to get together with their wives and children and the fun they had carrying out amusing little science projects when they did. (Carl had four sons, including an acrobatic pair of twins who were kept in two playpens, one upended on top of the other. The twins never seemed to mind!)
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On July 22, 1939, he and my mother, Elsa Dahart, were married by Dr. A. Powell Davies, a distinguished member of the Unitarian pantheon, at the All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, DC. At the time he was working for the War Department assigning radio frequencies for Army facilities ("boring!"). Later, seeking a more research-oriented job, he accepted a position in signal detection and the development of radar at Fort Hancock in Sandy Hook, New Jersey, and my parents relocated to the Jersey Shore town of Long Branch. After Pearl Harbor, when the country moved to a wartime footing, his work was transferred to the Evans Laboratory in Belmar and my parents moved to nearby Neptune.

July 22, 1939: King and Elsa's wedding reception was hosted by their friends Kitty and Bill Anderson at their home in Alexandria VA. My dad's mother is at the left of the front row.

King and Elsa - young marrieds.

My mom knitting tiny garments as she and my dad await the arrival of their first child.

I was born in Neptune in February of 1943, the eldest of four children. I like to think my parents named me “Cynthia,” the Greek version of Diana, goddess of the moon, in a moment of prescience, though I have no idea whether that was so. Although we were not a physically demonstrative family, I always felt that I was valued and cherished. The nurturing environment, however, was probably more my mother’s doing. My father tended to relate to children as miniature adults. One of my cousins still remembers his showing me how to change a tire and explaining torque to me; I was four years old at the time.
        
In Neptune, we were part of the small year-round population of a summer beach resort community where a lot of homes stood empty all winter. Today it is all paved roads and marinas and lawns, but when I was little it was very rural - not agricultural, but mostly gravel roads where you could ride your bike and not pass any houses or see any people for long stretches. (I doubt a small child would be permitted to do that today, but - times have changed.) Yards were mostly sand and rock gardens; you couldn’t have a lawn unless you brought in loads of topsoil, which my parents and most of our neighbors never did. 

Our bungalow on Pinewood Drive in Shark River Hills

Until I was 4 or 5 my parents rented a tiny house down near the Shark River from a couple who brought in a little extra income by vacating their home and residing in an apartment over their garage. We then moved to a very comfortable home on Pinewood Drive at the corner of Hampton Court that, though not large, was baronial compared with the little rental. It had screened-in porches front and back, where we slept on very hot nights, and where we played with cards and jacks and pickup sticks and ouija boards (remember ouija boards?) all summer; and a floor plan that allowed our electric trains to disappear into another room and circle around a wall before reappearing. Not sure who loved those trains the most, the children or their father!

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I wish I could give a firsthand account of Project Diana, which my father always regarded as his proudest achievement; but although I have many clear memories from that era of my life, including the birth of my sister Leslie in 1945, the excitement surrounding the successful moon shot isn't one of them. The late David Mofenson, my earliest playmate and fellow Project Diana legacy (the Signal Lab families tended to socialize mainly with each other during those early years in Neptune), recalled these moments vividly, so perhaps this isn't the sort of thing little girls tend to hang onto; in any case, not this little girl. What I do remember is accompanying my mom to pick up my dad after work - we only had one car - and waiting outside those old Marconi Lab buildings for him to emerge. I suppose because what went on inside was top secret, we never went in. The first time I ever stepped inside those buildings was many decades later, after they were reclaimed by InfoAge, the wonderful brain child of a local history buff named Fred Carl. 

(the Project Diana team: Harold D Webb, John H DeWitt Jr, Jacob Mofenson, Herbert P Kauffman, and E King Stodola)

​In 1948, my father took a job with Reeves Instrument Corporation in New York City and began several years of commuting by rail (including a running bridge game on the way in and reading murder mysteries on the way home), punctuated by frequent business trips around the country. At that point he became a weekend father, leaving my mother to shoulder most of the burdens and pleasures of child-rearing. Still, he was very much present most weekends, and my Saturday morning memories of my dad are of the lower half of his body jutting out from under his car. (Brat that I was, I used to tell him if you looked long enough and hard enough, you could probably find something wrong with almost anything.) We never needed a plumber or electrician because he was an amazing Mr. Fixit who could take on just about any washing machine or toaster that dared to break. He also became an avid outboard motorboater during these years, an interest that persisted even after we left Neptune. We had a series of vessels with names consisting of the first two letters of each of his children's names - first CYLESH and later CYLESHRO.
       
In 1956, Reeves moved to Garden City, Long Island, and the commute from Neptune was no longer feasible. My dad considered changing jobs at that time, which also would have involved moves (to either California or Michigan), but in the end Reeves made the best offer. And so our Jersey Shore days drew to a close.  

After a little house-hunting, my parents realized they could get a better house by living further out on the island - meaning my father would once again be relegated to a 45-minute commute, this time by car. My mother thought most of Long Island was too flat and zeroed in on the town of Northport because it had hills. Our real estate agent spent a whole day ferrying us around and scoping us out before revealing that there was a house for sale at 118 Stanton Street, right next door to her own home. It was truly a wonderful house, with a bay window, a Dutch front door, knotty pine paneling, a beautiful tilework fireplace, bedrooms with special features (mine had an outdoor balcony and Leslie’s had a loft), and a huge green yard, a novelty for us. We all fell in love with it immediately. A bonus, especially for my dad, was an active Unitarian fellowship located just a few miles away in Huntington; it was the first time we'd ever lived closer than an hour's drive to the nearest Unitarian church. Another bonus was the opportunity to pilot the latest CYLESHRO across the 8-mile expanse of the Long Island Sound (usually including one of his typical drive-in, drive-out visits to friends in Connecticut - which turned into fly-in, fly-out visits after my mother died and he took up flying).

My parents’ relationship was amazingly harmonious, something enough others have commented on to convince me I’m not selectively forgetting unpleasant moments. I never remember hearing them argue, let alone raise their voices to one another. I tended to attribute this to submissiveness on my mother’s part, but having watched my father’s equally courteous behavior towards his second wife, Rose, whom he married three years after my mother’s death in 1965, I think it also speaks to his fundamentally gentlemanly nature, as well as to his proclivity for choosing gentle and forbearing women as his life partners.  
        
A running joke between my parents was my father’s nickname for my mother, Blondie—not because she was blonde (she wasn’t), but because they in some way identified with the comic strip characters Dagwood and Blondie Bumstead - Blondie handing Dagwood his briefcase and hurrying him into a catapult positioned to propel him out the front door in time to catch his bus; Dagwood constructing and wolfing down monster three-layered sandwiches with revolting combinations of ingredients; Dagwood providing endless exasperation-cum-amusement for the long-suffering ditzy-but-wise Blondie. (As I sit here remembering things like my father’s collection of dog ticks in a jar of kerosene, which he showed off like a trophy as it grew bigger over the course of the summer, I think maybe this metaphor wasn’t so far-fetched!  Dagwood could surely relate to that. But my mother, though long-suffering and wise, was never ditzy.  Still, that was part of the joke.)

Although both his wives were mild mannered and softspoken, my father always admired high-powered professional women immensely and counted many among his wide circle of friends. It was from him, much more than from my mother, that I received the message that women could do anything and be anything they chose. (My mom used to joke that it’s just as easy to love a rich man as a poor man – at least, I think she was joking!) He strongly urged me to take all the math and science I could cram into my schedule and made sure I enrolled in AP physics and AP calculus, something I’ve never regretted as it has opened doors that would otherwise have been closed to me.
       
My father's gadgeteering proclivities led to numerous patents - the most lucrative being an electronic thermostat, an updated version of which can still be found in most houses. The patent was infringed on by Honeywell, which reverse-engineered the product and marketed it on a scale beyond anything Reeves Instrument could have dreamed of. My father won a court case against Honeywell, resulting in a royalty stream that lasted for many years. He always said he had the best of both worlds with this arrangement and claimed it put me through college.

Sometime during the 1970s, my father’s career took a disastrous turn. Back in 1955, Reeves had merged with Dynamics Corporation of America. When the electronics industry fell into a deep slump, the merged operation pulled up stakes and moved to Florida in hopes of riding out the downturn by lowering expenses. It seemed to work, but not for long, and when DCA went bankrupt, it took Reeves down with it. First to be paid off were the stockholders and creditors, leaving precious little for the senior executives at Reeves, including my father, who lost their pensions. To eke out a living, he took a series of consulting jobs requiring him to live in seedy motels and tiny furnished flats all over the country, plus a more extended stint near Syracuse, New York - until he finally secured a job in Electronic Warfare at the Pentagon. All his years at Evans Lab had qualified him for a government pension, but the amount was based on his highest three years of salary, the famous federal high-3, and for him those years were 1946, 1947, and 1948. The Pentagon job enabled him to accumulate three more years, enough to provide an adequate retirement income. So his heroic efforts paid off, and in the end he landed on his feet. It wasn’t until I myself reached retirement age that I fully understood the gravity of his plight. But although he was perfectly capable of a good rant, I never heard him complain about the injustice of his situation at a time of life when he should be winding down rather than revving up.

July 20, 1968: Rose and Dad are married on Long Island, in the presence of his four children, her three sons, two sons-in-law, and their first grandchild.

Some things never change: Mr Fixit

Some things never change: Not one but two pocket protectors

The last few years of my father’s life were blighted by Alzheimer’s Disease. Although it’s said that Alzheimer’s is harder on the caregiver than the victim, my father was well aware of his deficits for much of that time, and angry and frustrated by his declining abilities and failing memory. Fortunately his downward spiral was relatively rapid, about four years. By then he had enjoyed a long and mostly fulfilling career; he had lived to see his children reach adulthood and meet his grandchildren. My stepmother, his life companion of more than two decades, was still by his side. Although I devoutly wish we could have enjoyed his company into advanced old age, the arc of his life was by and large complete, and his death in April of 1992, at the age of 77, was actually a mercy and a release (in stunning contrast to my mother, felled in midflight at the peak of her powers). Even with advance directives, no one can speak for others when the moment actually arrives, but I doubt he would have wanted his sad deterioration to be further prolonged. Or so I hope.
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I could say so much more about my father – his love of language and his gregarious nature, both, I think, unusual in an engineer, especially in one who was in most respects the quintessential engineer. I could talk about his encouragement of dinnertime debates and his favorite saying, “It ain’t necessarily so.” I could carry on about his love of gadgets (passed on to at least two of his four children, my brother and me) and his famous misshapen suits, weighed down by the gadgets and papers and books he stuffed in his pockets. But I will leave those threads for others to pick up and just state for the record how lucky I feel to have had him for a father. 

Happy birthday, Daddy, love you to the moon and back!