1948-1954 Kansas City, KS Part 2: My Mother’s Family

Posted on July 22, 2020 by Mike

My mother’s parents were John and Clara Cernech. I know very little about John’s antecedents. I was told that his father was a Croat. His mother’s name was Rose Duffy. Clara’s maiden name was Keuchel (rhymes with “cycle”), which is pretty clearly German. Her mother’s maiden name was Bartolak, which is, I think, Polish. Somebody on her side was certainly Polish. She considered herself Polish. Of course, being German was not popular in the forties.

I am pretty sure that all four of my maternal great-grandparents were already dead when I was born. In any case, I never met any of them.

My mom was born on October 2, 1925. She died in March of 1998. My grandparents were born near the end of the nineteenth century, and they died in the eighties. I found their grave marker online. She died in 1980; he died in 1985.

My mom had only one sibling, an older brother whose name was Clarence. Everyone called him Dean. I don’t know the derivation of his nickname. I called him Uncle Dean. He became an Osteopath. Many of his friends called him “Doc”. He died in 1999.

Uncle Dean’s wife was named Dorothy. They had three sons, John¹ (who was sometimes called Johnny Carl to distinguish him from his grandfather), Terry², and Rick³. Terry was my age. In fact, although we lived twenty miles apart, we were in the same class of about thirty-five boys at Rockhurst High School. John, who also attended Rockhurst, was two or three years older than Terry and me; Rick, whom we called Ricky at the time, was two or three years younger.

We visited Uncle Dean’s family pretty often, but not when we were still living in KC KS. Since we did not have a car, and they lived in Sugar Creek, on the far eastern edge of the KC metropolitan area, it would have been difficult. It might have been possible to take a bus with several transfers, but I have no memory of doing so. Besides, I was often in the hospital or recovering from the last operation.

I had the gun, holster, and hat, but not the rest of the get-up.

When we did visit them, I was very impressed. I really liked hanging out with Terry. He was only five months older than I was, but he was much more mature, and he had an older brother to show him the ropes. I remember that I always wore my toy pistols and holster when we went there in the mid-fifties. There was a play room downstairs. The cushions from the couch would go on the floor, and we had competitions over who could execute the most spectacular death by hostile gunfire. We also had extensive quick-draw practice. Terry had developed a move in which he rolled on the ground while drawing his pistol. In those days television was dominated by Westerns. Nearly all young boys had guns. I wore mine everywhere.

Also, the Cerneches always seemed to have those highly desirable toys that were on the back covers of catalogs. I remember that they had a fort with both soldiers and Indians—all plastic. I coveted it greatly.

They also had the first color television that I ever saw. I remember being awestruck while viewing “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color.” And get this, they actually flew (flew!) out to California as a family and spent a day at Disneyland. They got to see the hippopotamus sneak up on their boat in person! I was so envious.

Once Uncle Dean took us rabbit hunting. Their dog Buster, a German Shepherd, ran around a field scaring up the bunnies. Uncle Dean (and maybe John, but certainly not the rest of us) shot at them with a pistol. At least one was killed. I remember that he showed us how to clean it.

I remember two other occasions rather vividly. In the first one Aunt Dorothy drove me, Terry, and Rick to a theater to see a Roy Rogers movie. Afterwards, while we were waiting for her to pick us up, a fight broke out among some older kids in the parking lot. I was excited, but more than a little scared. By then I was no longer the biggest kid; in fact, I was a string bean. Terry knew some of the people involved. Fortunately, nothing came of it.

The other incident must have occurred in 1961. Terry had a 45 of Roy Orbison singing “Running Scared”. I absolutely loved it. It got me interested in pop music. A few years later I became rather obsessive about rock and roll. I knew who recorded every song. This is barely an exaggeration.

I am not sure that my cousins ever came to our house in Prairie Village. We did not have a lot of room. It would have been cramped.

Even though they owned the house, I don’t think that my grandparents lived with us in KC KS. If they did, they moved before I knew what was going on. They lived in Grand Island, NE, and then in Leavenworth, KS. My granddad worked for the Boss Glove Company. I don’t know what his job was.

I have a vague memory that we visited them once in Grand Island, but I have no recollection of how we could have traveled there. Maybe we took the train. I remember that their next-door neighbors were Japanese, which seemed very exotic to me. My grandmother liked them, but I did not know what to think. Japanese people were NEVER on television except as the hated enemy in war movies.

We definitely visited my grandparents in Leavenworth. The big tourist attractions there were the high-security federal penitentiary and the high-security military prison. Residents of Leavenworth always kept their radios on listening for news of prison breaks from either federal prison or from the high-security state prison in nearby Lansing, the last town through which we passed en route to their house on Kickapoo St. The escapees from Lansing were considered more dangerous. Most violent criminals were locked up in state prisons.

The Wavadas drove up to Leavenworth on many Easters and Thanksgivings. Uncle Dean brought his brood, too. There were two specialties of the house, czarnina (duck’s blood soup) and povitica (rolled nut bread). Uncle Dean was crazy about the former, which I refused to sample after they told me what it was. Everyone loved the latter. No matter how much my grandmother made, we ate it up.

At least once I and a subset of the cousins (Terry and Ricky?) were allowed to stay overnight at my grandparents. This was the highlight of my youth. In the afternoon my grandmother took us bowling. After supper we had delicious root beer floats. There were no extra beds, and so my grandmother lay some cushions on the floor for us to sleep on. Best of all, we got to stay up and watch television as late as we wanted to. We watched an Abbott and Costello movie on the late show (10:30 central time). I assume that we fell asleep in the middle, and the test pattern was on all night.

On one of our last trips to Leavenworth I was exploring either the basement or the garage by myself. I came across a men’s magazine called Argosy. I read one or two scandalous stories. I still remember one line: “She wore a fishnet bra; but it did not contain fish.” I certainly never told anyone about this, which was probably the naughtiest thing that I ever did as a kid.

I have vague recollections of going to a lot of weddings and funerals involving my mother’s relatives. These were memorable occasions for me because my cousins were always there. I only remember two details: running around at full speed in dress clothes and occasionally being called on to translate for Terry and Ricky, who were less easy for grownups to understand. It’s possible that they just wanted to hear how well the young harelip could talk.

Most of the relatives at these gatherings were vague to me. Two were very clear: Uncle Joe and Aunt Josephine. Joe was a mild mannered and friendly guy. Josephine was, to be kind, portly. But then … a polka would be heard, and the two of them would fly around the room. Everyone always cleared the floor for them and loudly applauded when the song was over.

Everyone in my immediate family really liked my Aunt Dorothy, but she and Uncle Dean eventually got divorced. To my knowledge this was an unprecedented event for that side of the family, which was 100 percent Catholic. Uncle Dean married his medical technician, Mildred, shortly thereafter at Unity Village, a huge Unitarian complex in KC. I don’t remember if my grandparents attended or not. The four Wavadas did.

Dean and Mildred had a son Paul, whom everyone called Paul Stacy⁴. I don’t think that I ever met him. I might have said hello at my high school graduation or somewhere or Terry’s first wedding.

I remember that on at least one occasion we visited a Bartolak family. I think that her name was Joy, but I don’t remember her husband.

We also visited a relative who was in some way disabled. She spent most of her time doing jigsaw puzzles. I thought that she had a great life. I don’t remember the names of anyone in that household.

Terry has put on a few pounds, and the beard is new, but I would still recognize him.

1. John worked as an educational administrator. He worked at Creighton University in Omaha for many years. He died in 2023. His obituary can be found here. John came to see me when I was coaching debate at U-M. I never understood what that was about.

2. Terry is living in the Springfield, MO, area. His LinkedIn page can be found here.

3. In 2022 Rick contacted me by email. He apparently arranged cruises for people. After my solo voyage from Budapest to Amsterdam, I wrote to him and sent a link to my journal. He never responded.

4. I found a LinkedIn page for Paul Cernech. It is probably the person who was always called “Paul Stacy”. It is not a common name, and the dates seem about right.

1971 January-February: Ft. Gordon, GA

Posted on July 21, 2020 by Mike

MP Training at Fort Gordon Continue reading →

My orders instructed me to report to Fort Gordon, GA, another military base named for a Confederate general, for training as a Military Policeman. Fort Gordon is near Augusta. I flew to the Augusta airport from KC. Almost five decades later I can still remember the smell of the air around the airport. I don’t know what produced the stench—something industrial, i think. It was almost overpowering.

I was assigned to E-10-4: echo company, tenth battalion, fourth MP training brigade. I was surprised to find that, in our platoon at least, there seemed to be quite a few college graduates. I later learned that the minimum GT score for MP’s was 90. Our company in Basic had been roughly evenly split between draftees and guys who enlisted. Here almost everyone had been drafted.

We shared the mess hall and the training schedule with F-10-4, called “F Troop” by everyone including the guys who were in it.

I don’t remember the name of our platoon sergeant. He barely went through the motions of supervising, and he did no training at all. He spent most days in the rec room shooting pool while we were out training.

As in Basic, each squad had temporary corporals. The ones in Basic had just been guys appointed, apparently at random, by the drill sergeant. The ones at MP school had volunteered to spend a week or two after Basic being trained how to be a corporal. In exchange, if my memory is right, they were guaranteed a promotion to E2 (one stripe!) at the end of AIT.

This one costs $1,250. Burt’s probably cost less.

Our squad’s pseudo-corporal was named Burt. I don’t remember his first name. He had enlisted with the intention of becoming an MP for life. He kept in his locker a leather-bound family bible that was at least three inches thick. He was very proud of it. He showed me once how it included pages to record marriages, births, and deaths. He told me that how much it cost, and the figure astounded me. I asked him why he did not buy a cheap bible and a spiral notebook for the family history part. He took my question seriously.

One of the other temporary corporals was named Junkker. He allegedly scored 160 on both GT tests. I never got a chance to know him very well.

Here is a list of the guys in my squad. I might have missed one or two people.

Ken Wainwright went to Boston College. He knew two of my friends from high school, John Rubin and Pat Dobel, my first debate partner. They had both attended BC.
Since Dawson Waites was a little chubby, he was designated as a “road guard”. Whenever the company, while marching to a training area, approached an intersection, the sergeant or officer leading us would yell “Road guards post!” Dawson and the other road guards had to run to the front to stop traffic. In the Army they often talked about the (Airborne) Ranger Shuffle. Dawson perfected the Forest Ranger Shuffle, which was slightly slower than a standard walking pace.
Jerry White was a 6’9″ black guy who flew to Cincinnati every weekend to play semi-pro basketball. Since we had almost no free time during the week, the rest of us did not get much chance to know him very well.
Bob Willems was from New Jersey. He went to Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey.
AJ Williams lived in the Boston area and went to Bates College in Maine. He was the state champion in the mile run.
Ned Wilson went tp Ohio State, but I tried not to hold it against him. He was married and kept to himself most of the time.
Dave Zimmerman went to American University in DC.

As you might have guessed, we were assigned in alphabetical order. We had single beds (not bunks). Mine was between Dawson Waites’s and Jerry White’s. Aside from Jerry and Acting-Corporal Burt, we were a fairly homogeneous group of pretty well-educated draftees who were just trying to get through the next two years in one piece. It was pleasant to be able to have conversations about something besides toughness, girlfriends, and cars.

Rumors were slightly less prevalent than in Basic. Most centered upon our future duty assignments. About halfway through our training the chief cook at the mess hall disappeared. The rumor was that he had been caught selling meat on the black market.

One of the biggest differences between Basic and AIT was that we were actually graded. In theory it was possible to flunk. A couple of guys tried to fail the training, which would have got them assigned to some other MOS. My recollection is that we were required to score at least 700 out of 1,000 points. The last test was physical fitness. A guy named Walton had deliberately done badly enough that his total score was only 695. However, before they posted the total his “commander rating” had been improved enough to put him over the threshold. It was a little surprising that he even had a commander rating. He had gone AWOL once, and he absolutely refused to march in formation. He shuffled along behind us.

Some of the training classes were fairly interesting. They were all better than map reading in Basic Trainig. My favorite was learning about the various categories of fingerprints. My own set of ten, which I had never contemplated before, contained examples of almost every category. We also learned how to take prints using ink and paper.

The military law classes were a joke, which was probably appropriate. After all, there is a famous book, which I have read, called Military Justice is to Justice as Military Music is to Music. The title comes from a quote from Groucho Marx, who probably stole it from Georges Clemenceau. Before presenting any material that would be on the test, the instructor loudly announced, “THIS IS IMPORTANT!!”

We also learned to talk on the radio. We had to memorize the Army’s phonetic alphabet (in which alpha, bravo, charlie replaced the Able, Baker, Charlie series that was used in World War II) and the ten-series (a la Broderick Crawford). We were also enjoined never to use the word “repeat”. Instead, you should say “say again”.

We did not have to carry weapons with us. The only time that they issued us M16s was when we went on bivouac, a camping trip that lasted a few days. The only weapon that we learned to use was the Colt .45 caliber handgun. There was a sharp contrast between this hand cannon and the rifle that we were all now familiar with. The M16 had almost no kick. The .45 would rip your arm off if you were not careful. Furthermore, those huge slugs were very scary. The trainers told us that if one hit you in the toe you would go down. The biggest difference was that it was MUCH easier to hit a target at 300 meters with an M16 than it was to hit one with a .45 that was ten times closer!

We fired these things a few times on the firing range before we were tested on our marksmanship. “Up and down-range” was constantly yelled at us. Unfortunately, it was always yelled in English, and that was not the mother tongue of some of the guys from Puerto Rico, particularly Private Manuel.

When the instructor explained how to hold the pistol so that the recoil did not brain you, Manuel evidently missed it. The first time that Manuel fired the .45 it kicked back and smacked him in the forehead. He was only stunned, but the gun made a big mark in his forehead that did not go away for weeks.

Another time on the firing line an instructor noticed that Manuel was doing something wrong. He approached Manuel from the rear and addressed him by name. Manuel spun around so that they were facing each other. Manuel’s .45 was pointed at the instructor’s head. The .45 was loaded, the safety was off, and a round was in the chamber.

The instructor calmly said. “Manuel: about face.” Manuel knew this command, and he turned back toward the firing range. The instructor, still behind him, then reached toward Manuel’s weapon and told him to hand it to him. Once he had the .45 in his hand, the instructor loudly informed Manuel what he had been doing wrong. He may have even made him do some push-ups.

Towards the end of the training we were given the chance to try to qualify with the .45. We took forty shots at targets, and an instructor kept score. Here are the details:

- The passing score was 300 out of a possible 400.

The test had two parts. The first used standard bullseye targets with ten concentric circles. The innermost circle was worth ten points. The outermost was worth one. For this part of the test we were able to take our time, hold the weapon with both hands, and aim carefully. I think that ten shots were at twenty meters, and ten were at thirty meters.
For the second part the bullseye target was replaced by three truncated life-sized silhouettes. This time we shot twenty times at thirty, twenty, and ten meters, and we had to shoot rapidly from different positions. The last few at ten meters were shot “from the hip” like a cowboy in a gunfight. Each hole in one of the silhouettes was worth ten points.

We all took our forty shots in the first round. A few guys who were experienced shooters qualified on that round. They were allowed to return to the barracks. The rest of us remained until we qualified, or they gave up on us.

Nobody from our squad qualified on the first try, but all the rest of the guys did better than I did. My score was only 68 out of a possible 400! I thought for sure that all three of my shots from the hip must surely have hit one of the silhouettes. They were only ten meters away, but I missed all of them!

For the second round a new rule was added. If you did not score at least 100 on the bullseye, you would not be allowed to shoot at the silhouettes.

I can proudly report that I did much better on the bullseyes the second time. I looked at my target and quickly added my score in my head. It was 80 or 81. I was thrilled. That was much better than the first time. I knew that I would not be allowed to shoot at the silhouettes in this round, but I now felt that I had some chance of qualifying in round four or five.

When the instructor came around to grade my bullseye, he informed me that I would “need to hit nearly all of the silhouettes to qualify.”

The words “nearly all” banged around in my head, but I gave the correct response, which was “Yes, sergeant.”

Our silhouettes were closer together, they did not have stands, and they were green.

So, I was allowed to shoot at the silhouettes. Once again, I did much better. At the end I could see that I had hit one of the targets nearly half the time, and there were also four or five ricochets. The ricochets are easy to discern. Regular holes are round. Ricochets are much higher than they are wide because they have bounced off of the ground up toward the target at a steep angle.

One again the instructor surprised me. He looked at my targets and said, “Well, some of these holes look like they have two or three bullets in them. You qualified. Turn in your weapon.” He obviously knew about ricochets. Either he was extremely poor at arithmetic, or he just wanted to put an end to this as fast as possible.

Only a few guys qualified in the second round. The rest stayed at the testing area to go through the process again. The best part was that the guys who qualified in the first round learned when they arrived back at the barracks that they earned the privilege of being on KP for supper. By the time that I arrived with the second group, the KP roster was filled. We were actually left on our own, a very rare thing.

So, the Army allowed me to wear a ribbon touting my skill with the hand cannon. However, I knew in my heart that I was a terrible shot. I vowed never again to squeeze the trigger on one of those things. If I ever needed to use it, I would throw it rather than fire it.

We were supposed to learn how to drive a five-speed standard-transmission Jeep. We did have one class in it, but we were supposed to have two. They warned us that the Jeeps had very high centers of gravity. They said that we should NEVER drive faster than 35 miles per hour.

Most of the guys got to do some driving. The guys who were familiar with standard transmission cars leapt at the chance to drive a Jeep. I never got to drive at all.

I suspect that Private Manuel, who had never operated any kind of car, set a new world’s record for driving the shortest distance before totaling a vehicle. The previous driver had left the Jeep in first gear with the brake off and the steering wheel turned hard to the left. Another Jeep was parked to his left and less than a foot in front. Manuel turned the key and his Jeep lurched into the other Jeep’s rear corner, which was armored. Manuel still had his hand on the key, and he kept turning until something important under the hood was dismembered, and the engine in Manuel’s jeep went silent forever.

Approximately three-fourths of us actually got to drive. Two drivers flipped their Jeeps because they went too fast around a corner. One was Manuel. I don’t remember if there were injuries. If so, they must not have been too serious.

We had to take a driving test. I flunked. They gave me an hour or so of personalized instructions in the evening, after which I passed easily. Subsequently all of my personal cars (except for the Duster that Sue bought) have had standard transmissions up until 2018, when it was no longer available. I did learn something in the Army.

We had an interesting class in hand-to-hand combat. The first part involved showing us how to bodyslam an opponent. Since this technique is essentially useless outside of a professional wrestling match, they were actually teaching us how to take a fall without breaking any bones.

Our company was joined for this training by a small group of Marines. The instructors had a side bet on whether the first trainee to break a collarbone would be one of the 200 Army guys or the 14 Marines. The guy who bet on the jarheads won, but two of our guys also broke collarbones. In both cases the guys survived the first slam, but they both tried to break their falls with their hands. The instructors told both of them that if they did that again they would probably break something, but they could not help themselves.

It pretty much goes without saying that one of the guys who broke his collarbone was Manuel. They took him to the hospital, and we never saw him again. I don’t remember the other guy.

I really enjoyed learning how to escape from a side headlock. For the next thirty years of my life I secretly hoped that someone would have tried to put a side headlock on me. If they were under 250 pounds, they might have been in for a surprise.

The most memorable aspect of MP training was bivouac, an overnight camping trip. Each of us was issued a pack and half of a tent. We were paired up with another member of our squad, in my case Dawson Waites. We were also issued M16s and a cartridge full of blanks. Since Dawson was one of the road guards, he was issued an M60 machine gun, which was heavier, instead of a rifle. He also was assigned to the TOC (Tactical Operactions Command). So, we put up our tent together, but he spent the night at the TOC. I had the tent to myself.

A few of the guys were assigned to be the enemy. They were supposed to plan some kind of attack on our campsite. We were told to set up a schedule so that one of the two occupants of the tent was on guard at all times. I, however, did not have a tentmate. So, my choices were to go to sleep, to stay up all night guarding an empty tent, or to do some combination of the two. I chose the first option.

AJ Williams was in the tent next to mine. When he was on guard duty and I was half-asleep, he ran around yelling about how he had spotted the enemy. He set his rifle on my tent about one foot from my head and shot off a round or two. Then he ran around and yelled some more. He put the rifle back near my head and shot off a few more rounds. I pretended that I didn’t hear him and stayed in the tent. I kept up the act the next morning and remarked about how easy it was to sleep in the fresh open air.

On the next day we went to MP City, which was a mock-up of a few blocks of a real city. They taught us riot control. The techniques that we learned bore no resemblance with what you see in 2020. Basically, we just stomped our feet as we walked.

A sergeant taught us the proper way to search someone. To see if we learned the lesson he gave half of us a bunch of pencils and told us to hide some on our bodies. Then another trainee would search us to see if he could find all of them. The guy who searched me was from F Troop. It did not surprise me that he could not find any of the six pencils that I hid in or under my clothes.

We also learned how to direct traffic. The public is supposed to assume that you have a stop sign on your chest and your back. You never face the traffic that you want to proceed. Those cars are on your right and your left.

The written test and the physical test were both pretty easy. No one studied or practiced, and everyone passed.

The last big event that we faced before the graduation ceremony was the commander’s inspection. Our CO, whom I remember not at all, was scheduled to come to the barracks wearing a pair of white gloves. In addition to looking for dirt, he also could quiz anyone on any subject.

We were allowed a few hours to prepare our gear and our brains for the inspection. For the first time ever our sergeant appeared in the barracks. He called us together and told us, “If anyone asks you if anyone checked you out for this inspection, tell them that I did. Has everyone got that?” Then he left to shot a few more racks of pool.

An hour or so later the sergeant came back and walked around the barracks. He eventually came over to me and asked me, “Did anyone check you out for this inspection?”

I quickly responded, “Yes, sergeant.”

“Who checked you out?” he asked.

“You did, sergeant!”

He then examined the name tag on my fatigue shirt and jotted it down in his notebook.

There was one and only one place for everything in the footlocker.

The inspection itself was not very memorable. Jerry White had a skin condition that prevented him from shaving. He used some kind of depilatory cream. In the place in his footlocker reserved for a razor he had placed the knife that he used to remove the cream. The captain may have let him skate on that, but the knife was clearly marked as belonging to the mess hall. Jerry had stolen it. He got yelled at, but nothing came of it. At that point they just wanted to get rid of us.

The next day at roll call the captain announced the names of a dozen or so trainees, including Ned Wilson and me, who had been recommended for promotion. One of the fuck-ups was named Lovado, and when they called my name (mispronouncing it wuh VAH duh), he pretended that they had called his name and danced around in celebration.

We had to face a board of review of sergeants and officers one at a time. They asked us a bunch of questions. I missed one about the name assigned to some kind of flag, but I was the only person who got one of the questions right: “What is the first thing that you do in the event of a chemical, radiological, or biological attack?”

My answer: “Stop breathing.”

So I got promoted to E2. I now was allowed to sew a stripe on my sleeve. It was also worth a few dollars per month, but it ended up being worth more than that to me. I was quite sure that my promotion was all due to the fact that I had lied to the platoon sergeant about my gear being checked out.

Then came the moment of truth in which they announced all the permanent duty assignments. Wainwright got White Sands, NM. Willems, Williams, Wilson, Zimmerman, and I got Sandia Base, NM. So the last five college graduates in alphabetical order all were going to SBNM. This was great news.

We were all ecstatic. I asked one of the sergeants whatt Sandia Base was like. He was astounded that I had been assigned there. He said, “You got Sandia? That’s the best duty in the whole country.

I cannot remember anyone else’s assignment, not even Dawson Waites’. He was not sent overseas, but some people were.

It appeared I and all of my friends had avoided the threat of Vietnam. Now we had to work out some way to tolerate the next twenty months as Army cops.

1977-1980 Part 2: Teaching at Wayne State

Posted on July 15, 2020 by Mike

I bes a speech teacher. Continue reading →

I had no doubt that the speech department at Wayne State would be much different from the corresponding department at U-M, but I underestimated the degree of difference. Undergraduate students in many disciplines at Wayne State were required to take Speech 100, the introductory public speaking class. So, there was a large number of sections every semester, even in the summer. There were also fewer graduate students than at U-M. Consequently almost every graduate student in speech taught Speech 100. Many taught two or even three sections.

The makeup of the student body was also quite different. Almost no one at U-M commuted; almost everyone at Wayne did. Admission requirements at U-M were pretty high; at Wayne there were special programs for students who could not meet much lower standards. Nobody attended Wayne State in order to prepare for a career in the NBA or NFL but Wayne did have a good fencing team.

Before the first class in September 1977 the department chairman, Edward Pappas¹, held a mandatory briefing for all the first-time speech teachers. The emphasis of his presentation was to warn everyone that it was department’s strict policy NOT to correct grammar or spelling discrepancies‐I am quite certain that he avoided the words “mistake” and “error”. I soon learned that this policy was heavily influenced by one professor, Geneva Smitherman, who had a national reputation as a proponent of Black English as a legitimate dialect of American English.

This made it a little difficult to teach public speaking. One of the few tenets with which everyone concurs is that an effective speaker always adapts to the audience. If most of the target audience does not understand the dialect in which the speech is given, it is difficult to be effective. In Italy, for example, a speech given in Milan in the Neapolitan dialect would be understood by far fewer people than one given in English or German. The dialect is so different from standard Italian that Italians who move to Naples struggle to learn it. Almost no Italian knows two dialects. Public speeches are always in Italian.

In the very first class I always told students how I would calculate the final grades. Everyone was required to give four speeches, which counted for 15 percent each. The midterm exam, which consisted of short-answer questions (not multiple-choice), counted 10 percent. The final exam, also short answers, counted 25 percent. Each class started with a five-question quiz, the last of which was always an obscure trivia question. The quizzes and class participation together counted for 5 percent. I also offered extra credit to students who submitted an essay related to one of the topics covered in class. Only one student ever took advantage of this.

Some students did not notice important aspects of this, and so I emphasized them. Skipping any speech costs a grade and a half, more even than skipping the midterm. Also, the quizzes did not really count at all.

The prospect of tests that were not multiple-choice terrified some students. However, I always handed out a list of concepts and assured them that if they could give an example of each one, they would do well on the tests. I had one student who stumped me. She asked me after the class what I meant by “give an example.” I realized after a few minutes of probing that she really did not understand the concept of example. I did not know what to say. The word “example” to me is granular—I don’t know any way to explain it without using examples.

During my time at Wayne State the required textbook for the Speech 100 class was written by one of the professors, Ray Ross. After three years I had it pretty well memorized. I only mention this because one of my most memorable moments came at the very end of my college teaching career. In this case, the class was Speech 200 (Persuasion), which I preferred over the introductory class. We did not use the Speech 100 book.

In the very last class that I taught, a student named Irma was quite a bit older than most of the others. She had informed me that this was the only class that she was taking that semester. She had expected to get her degree (in education) in the spring, but the university had disallowed credits that she thought she earned when she took Speech 100 the second time. Evidently it never occurred to her that students cannot get credit twice for the same class.

One day there was a thunderstorm. I drove into school as usual. It was annoying to walk through the rain from my parking place to Manoogian, but I had done it in worse weather. A little after I arrived, I got a call from Sue. She said that Irma had called to find out if class had been canceled. She told Sue that she was sure that God had sent the storm to warn us not to have class. She was serious.

Irma did badly on both tests. Her speeches were only OK. I planned to give her a C. However, Irma turned in a paper for extra credit. It took me no more than a minute or two to realize that she had just copied one of the chapters from the Speech 100 textbook, the one book in the Library of Congress that every teacher in the department was almost certainly familiar with.

I thought about changing her grade to an F and contacting the dean’s office about her plagiarism. However, there would certainly be a hearing, and by that time I would be in Connecticut. So, I just gave her a C with no credit for the paper.

Believe it or not, she came to my office as I was packing up my stuff to leave forever to complain about her final grade. I told her that her grade was much closer to a D than a B. She told me that she spent a lot of time on that paper. I said that I knew that she had just copied it from the Speech 100 textbook. She admitted as much, but she insisted that she should be rewarded for her time. Needless to say, she had not learned too much about the techniques of persuasion for an audience of one.

One pair of students in Speech 100 evidently did not realize that the midterms would not be multiple choice. I knew that plenty of college students cheated on tests. I never did, and I was determined to make it extremely difficult to cheat on my tests. The classroom was wide, but shallow. I was sitting about twenty feet from them, and I could clearly see that they were copying off of each other. I did not say anything. When I graded their papers, both of their scores were in the thirties, and the next lowest score was in the sixties. They both dropped the class.

The first assignment in every Speech 100 class was to give a 1-2 minute speech introducing yourself to the class. In the first session after I explained the grading I would tell everyone about this assignment, which they would be expected to do in the second class. I then listed some of the things they might want to include. At the end, I asked for a volunteer to go first.

One time I forgot to recruit the first speaker. I felt bad about this, because people with stage fright might be very anxious that they would be called first. There was nothing that I could do other than ask at the start the second session for a volunteer to give the first speech. One student immediately raised his hand, went to the front of the class, and began his speech. It was something like the following;

Good afternoon. My name is William Robinson. I went to Mumford High School where I was on the track team. I am going to Wayne State University to study pre-law so that I can then go to Law School at Wayne State University to become a lawyer. Then I’m going to be a judge, so I can tell Whitey what to do. Thank you.

William gave all of his speeches, some of which were pretty good. However, he got the lowest grade on the midterm that I had ever seen, and he did not show up for the final exam. I had to give him an F.

On the other hand, one very diligent student had scores on the speeches and the midterms that were good enough that she only needed a low C on the final for an A in the course. She came to my office to tell me that about an opportunity she had to go to Hawaii. In order to take advantage of it, she needed to take the final in my class a few days early. She meekly asked me if that might be possible. I agreed. Just to be safe, the test that I gave her was from a previous year. She got a higher score than anyone who had taken it the first time that I administered it. I gave a different test to her class.

Debaters who took my Speech 100 class found it embarrassingly easy because I outlined what I was looking for in each speech, and I provided a list what to study for the tests. A debater had sniggered when he overheard me say that most of my students were afraid of me. However, after he had been in my class for a few weeks he reported back to me that I was right about that, but he could not understand why they were so intimidated.

A fellow who performed individual events (IE) also took my class. He skipped one of the speeches and never made it up. I gave him a C, and he hated me for it. He also borrowed a novel from me and never returned it.

Most of my amazing stories come from the university’s special programs. Project 350 was an admirable effort to aid students from the Detroit Public Schools who lacked one of the three requirements—test scores, grade point average, or teacher rating. 350 of these applicants were admitted conditionally for the summer semester. They took two or three classes, one of which was Speech 100. I taught these classes all three summers. I found that about 1/3 of the students had no business in college, 1/3 were questionable, and 1/3 were likely to do OK in college.

I tried to follow the department’s policies on correcting spelling and grammar. However, I was dumbfounded by one fellow’s midterm. I found almost every answer incomprehensible. I asked a few of the other grad students to try to make sense of them. No one could. The student did not finish the semester.

I felt sorry for several students. One was quite conscientious. He rode the bus to class on the day that he was assigned to give a speech. He rolled up a large piece of cardboard that he intended to use as a visual aid in the speech, presumably to make it easier to carry on the bus. Before his speech he set it on the teacher’s desk next to where he was standing. It unrolled a little, but I could not see what was on it, and he made no specific reference to it.

The purpose of the College of Lifelong Learning was to make a college education available to people who worked during the day. For the most part these students were older and more reliable. The classes only met once a week, but each session was three hours long! This made it difficult to prepare, especially for the classes in which the students gave speeches.

It was hard on the students, too. Most were tired, and they sometimes lobbied to be let out early. Because I was paid to teach for three hours, I insisted on using the entire period. This was not popular. To me it seemed that many of these students had little or no interest in learning. They wanted a college degree with the least possible effort. I cannot say that I blamed them.

One student, whose name I have forgotten, dressed in sweaters every week, several of them, one on top of another. His speech of introduction informed us that he was majoring in theology. The first graded speech was supposed to be expository, that is, to provide information, not to persuade people. His was a rather wandering disquisition about life in America. At one point he warned everyone that if Ted Kennedy were not elected president, God would visit a pestilence on the country.

One of the students later told me that this guy was a preacher/panhandler who hung around on Warren. One day while driving in to school it occurred to me that Wayne State, a private school, did not offer a degree in theology. He came to the first seven or eight classes, but I never saw him after that.

In one class I tried to explain the difference between correlation and causation. I ask the class if they thought that there was a positive or negative correlation between foot size and basketball ability. Most people in the class insisted that there was no correlation. I looked at the feet of the woman who was most vociferous about the lack of correlation. She was wearing gunboats.

I then asked who in the Detroit area had the biggest feet. Everyone knew that it was Bob Lanier, the Pistons’ star center, who wore size 22. I then asked who had the smallest feet. They were surprised when I started talking about premature babies in hospitals. I thought that this was a pretty good example to show that there was a strong correlation despite the lack of causation, but I don’t know if they understood the point.

The most dramatic moment in my teaching career came when a young man gave what was supposed to be a 5-7 minute expository speech. His subject was Malcolm X. About halfway through he proclaimed “I know I am going overtime, but I need to finish this.” When he finished his eleven-minute tirade he received an ovation from the class. I gave him a D on the speech. It was a dynamic speech, but it was not what I assigned.

The young man did not complain about the grade, and he worked hard on the rest of his speeches and did well on the tests. For his final grade I decided to throw out the Malcolm X speech, and I gave him an A for the class.

In almost every Lifelong Learning class one or more students suggested that the students should grade one another. I quickly snuffed that notion and guaranteed them that they did not want to be graded by other students.

I was also assigned to teach two classes with subject matters other than public speaking. The first was an introduction to argumentation and debate that was scheduled to take place at one of the schools extension sights. It might have been in Livonia. Only three students showed up for the first class, and I received a message shortly thereafter that the class was being canceled.

At Wayne State everyone studying in any field of therapy was required to take a course in group communications in the speech department. I taught one of these classes. Almost everyone in the class was studying to become a therapist. This group included the least skeptical people I have ever met.

One of the groups was scheduled to talk about access for disabled people. This was before the ADA had been passed. They held a preliminary discussion among themselves They then presented to the class their idea, which was to guarantee equal access to all businesses for all people regardless of their disabilities. It was warmly received by the rest of the class, and they could think of no questions for the group.

So I asked them about the cost. They said that in the preliminary discussion they had agreed not to talk about it. I asked them what they would do if the cost was more than the gross national product. They scoffed. I then asked them if they would include blind people, deaf people, and quadriplegics. All yes. Mentally ill? Yes.

Now, I am as liberal as they come, but even I think that this was outrageous. The grocery near our house came to mind. What would the poor owner do if a psychotic quadriplegic Helen Keller became a regular customer?

I honestly don’t know if I was a good teacher or not. I got very little feedback. However, I am quite sure that one of my presentations would have made the Sports Center highlight reel if they had one for speech teachers.

I was demonstrating how one might organize a speech on throwing playing cards² by making three main points, each of which had an example. The first point was how to throw a card up five or six feet and make it boomerang back to you. I did that by flicking the card up at a 45° angle with a lot of spin on it. I caught it when it came back down.

The second point was how to throw for distance. I threw a card as hard as I could. It flew over the students’ heads in a blur and crashed loudly against the back wall.

I then said that with a lot of practice you can throw for both distance and accuracy. I aimed a card toward the trash can in the back right corner. Its trajectory was a lazy spiral that terminated right over the trashcan. The card fluttered right in.I proceeded as if this result was totally what I expected. I calmly explained that you finish the last point, you simply summarize what you had said.

In actual fact, if I had a whole deck of cards, I doubt that I could have gotten any of them to land in that trashcan, which was thirty or forty feet away.

1. Dr. Edward Pappas died in 2018. His obituary is here.

2. A pretty good tutorial on card throwing is available here. I held the card the way that he shows, but I threw it overhand to try to snap the shoulder, elbow, wrist, and fingers all at the same time. I have always had a rag arm, but with practice—and I practiced a lot!—I could throw a card more than thirty yards against a light wind.

1977-1980 Part 1: Dealing with Detroit

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Mike

Living in Detroit was convenient but challenging. Continue reading →

U-M’s speech department knee-capped its debate program for the 1976-77 school year. I finished up my masters degree and applied to George Ziegelmueller at Wayne State as a PhD student. I was accepted. My new career as a graduate assistant started in the fall semester of 1977.

This lot is where our house was. The tree was not there when we lived there.

When I took the job at Wayne State, Sue was already working at Brothers Specifications in Detroit. It therefore made sense for us to move from our apartment in Plymouth to Detroit. We could get a lot more for less money, and both of our drives would be shorter. We rented a house at 12139 Chelsea, near City Airport (now called Coleman A. Young International Airport) and Chandler Park. We had at least twice as much space as before, and that did not count the full basement with a large wet bar.

At the time of our move I still had my little green Datsun 1200 hatchback. Sue’s Colt had been abandoned after it threw its third rod. She bought a gigantic Plymouth Duster to replace it. We called it the Tank; neither of us had ever owned a full-sized car before. I vividly remember changing one of its tires on an upward sloping exit ramp on the Ford Freeway in an ice storm. I got the card jacked up, but while I was loosening the bolts the jack gave way, and I had to start over. I was in a really rotten mood when I finally arrived home.

Sue and I had no complaints at all about the house on Chelsea. The rent was unbelievably cheap, and the house was well-built and comfortable. Furthermore, we lived there for quite a while without incident. The house to the right in the photo was occupied by a couple named Freddy and Juanita and their holy terror of a son, Fre-Fre, who used to throw rocks at me when I mowed our lawn. We were friendly with everyone in the neighborhood. When we moved in during the summer of 1977, all of the houses on both sides of the street were occupied. By the time that we left in very late 1980 several houses were empty and two or three were boarded up.

The first troubling incident occurred on New Years Eve. Sue and I were watching New Years Rocking Eve or one of the other countdown shows. We heard a fairly loud sound that could only have been a collision between two cars. I went outside and saw that our Plymouth Duster, which, as always, we had parked on the street in front of the house, was now sitting up past the sidewalk into the bushes in Freddy and Juanita’s front lawn. The left front bumper was a little dented, but otherwise it seemed OK.

The boy who lived directly across the street, whose name neither Sue nor I can now remember, told me that he had seen the car that crashed into ours and pointed up the street. I jogged up to where the car had just parked. I memorized the license plate number and the address of the house that the people in the car had entered.

Then we called the police. They came, but they were not much interested in pursuing the matter. They went to the house that I indicated, but the man who claimed to have driven the car said that our car pulled out and struck his car. He was allegedly sober, but the other man was not. Even though I told the police that there was an eyewitness, they said that there was nothing that they could do. Hey, it was New Years. No blood, no foul.

The second incident was at the office that I shared with Pam and Billy Benoit in Manoogian Hall at Wayne State. I was there in the evening because I was scheduled to teach a three-hour speech class in the College of Lifelong Learning. The next morning we all realized that some stuff was missing from the office. We called Wayne State Police. The lady who investigated noticed that the door had been scratched by some kind of tool. Evidently someone forced it open. That was a relief to me. The stuff the Benoits had lost was more valuable than what I lost (I don’t remember the items—a radio, I think). I am notoriously absent-minded, and I feared that I had forgotten to lock the door.

That week all of the doors in the building were outfitted with steel plates that were designed to prevent anyone from tampering with the locks.

Our house in Chelsea was attacked three times. The first time was in 1978 or 1979. While Sue was at work and I was at school, someone broke the glass on our back door and entered the house in broad daylight. They took the television, the Panasonic stereo unit that was also in Bob’s apartment on the Bob Newhart Show, and the AR-15 speakers.

We called the police, but they would not come because the perpetrators were no longer there. They told us to come to the precinct station to fill out a report. Since we did not have insurance, we could not see that that would accomplish anything. We did tell our landlord. He commiserated with us, and he replaced the glass on the door.

The second attack came when I was alone in the house taking a nap. I was awakened by a crash of glass that seemed to come from the back of the house. I kept my aluminum softball bat near the bed for just this eventuality. I walked swifty towards the back door brandishing my bat. The guy must have heard me; when I reached the door, he was running through our back yard toward the alley. I was disappointed. I planned to look him squarely in the eye and then swing at his knees. What if he pulled out a gun? Well I was still bullet-proof at that point.

I called the police and the landlord. The former gave me the same answer as previously. The latter replaced with plexiglass all the windows facing the back yard.

When I told some of the people at Wayne State about this incident, Gerry Cox took me aside and said that he and his 9mm handgun would like to move into our house for a little while. I declined his offer, which was serious.

By the time of the third attack late in 1980 we had replaced the television and the stereo system. This time when I came home I found the entire back door in the basement at the bottom of the steps. The plexiglass had held, but the hinges had not. This time the house was ransacked. Our brand new television and stereo were gone, but, thank goodness, they did not touch our computer and printer. They were both very heavy, and at the time it was pretty much unheard of for anyone to have a computer in the house.

This time the police came. They were especially interested in the fact that the mattress had been removed from the bed. The investigator told us that they were looking for guns.

This attack was a blessing in disguise. At that point we had already decided to go back to Connecticut after Christmas. The burglary gave us fewer things to move, and the insurance money just about covered the cost of moving what remained.

Sue learned about our last problem before I did. She received a call at home from the police. They informed her that someone had stolen the battery from our car, and they had it at the precinct station near Wayne State. She called me at work. I had driven the Duster that day and parked it on the street near Manoogian Hall.

This was, as I recall, my very last day at Wayne State. I persuaded someone to let me use his battery to help jump-start the car. That worked. I then very carefully drove a couple of miles to the precinct headquarters. If the car had stalled, I would have been stranded. There was no battery in it, and I had no means of communication.

I parked and stepped inside. I had to sit around for quite a while before a detective could talk with me. He said that the theft had been witnessed through binoculars by a Wayne State cop positioned on the roof of one of the buildings. She had called the DPD, and they apprehended the thief while he was still carrying the battery. He told me that the perpetrator was also wanted for grand theft auto.

I asked him for the battery. He said that the police needed it as evidence. I insisted that I needed the battery. My car was parked outside, and there was no battery in it. Furthermore, we were leaving town within the week, and we absolutely needed the battery. He still tried to claim that the battery was evidence, but when I pointed out that they had an eyewitness, and they were actually going to prosecute the guy for the auto theft, he relented.

The property officer led me down to the area where all the “evidence” was kept. There were two batteries in the cage. Neither was tagged. He asked me which one was mine, and I pointed at the JC Penney one. If I had pointed at the other one, I am sure that he would have given it to me. I had heard that every year the DPD had a big event in which it sold all of the unclaimed property. There was no way that anyone ever intended to use my battery as evidence.

I had no involvement whatever in the most serious incident. I was home watching Wonder Woman while Sue went to a nearby drug store for something. When she stepped inside the door, a guy with a gun told her to go to the back of the store and sit on the floor. She did so. Eventually, the guy left and the police came. Sue told them that she didn’t know anything, and they let her go.

She was still pretty upset when she arrived back at the house. She said, “I couldn’t believe it. I walked into the drug store right in the middle of a robbery. The guy had a gun!”

I replied with great compassion, “Really? You sound a bit unnerved. You missed a great Wonder Woman. They showed Lynda Carter in a bathing suit.”

There was one other major problem with living in Detroit—the snow. The city plowed the main streets, but it never maintained the streets in our neighborhood. The years that we lived there were characterized by cold and snowy winters. For weeks after a snowfall the streets had two cleared ruts a foot or so wide. Essentially every side street became one-way. Getting from our house to a main road was often a real challenge, especially for my Datsun, which was the absolute worst car in bad weather.

We did not have a problem with rats at our house, but other parts of the city did. The city purchased small steel dumpsters for every residence. The lids were rubber or plastic. Ours was back by the alley. Not long after these dumpsters were in place, somebody discovered that it was fun to put a lit M80 in one and shut the lid. The dumpster survived with no difficulty, but the lid was blown to bits. Pretty soon the rats had easier access to the garbage than ever.

1980 Why I Am Not a PhD

Posted on July 12, 2020 by Mike

Orals and dissertation Continue reading →

By May of 1980 I had enough hours in speech and related subjects to qualify for a PhD. My oral exams and my dissertation remained.

I needed to form a committee. I think that Steve Alderton¹ was assigned as the head of my committee. I doubt that I chose him. I did choose George Ziegelmueller, the Director of Forensics and also my boss, and Ray Ross, the author of the Speech 100 textbook. Other graduate students assured me that Ross was a soft touch.

I was not worried about the orals. I reviewed a few notes for maybe an hour just before the test began. A psych professor had told us that the average performance on oral exams is horrendous because most students get flustered. The best performance he had seen was by a mediocre student who also hosted a program on the university’s radio station. I figured that my 14+ years of debate experience was more valuable than that. I knew that the trick was to admit it quickly when you didn’t know something. Don’t try to invent an answer. That is, maximize the time spent on what you know by minimizing the time spent on what you don’t know.

There was one difficult question that I knew that I had to answer. Steve asked me whether validity or reliability was more important in a statistical study. I mulled over the question for a few seconds and then chose validity. I hedged my bet by saying that reliability was important, but if your study lacked validity, you did not have anything. I am pretty sure that I gave the right answer.

Anyway, the committee only kept me waiting for about five minutes before they told me that I passed.

The topic of my dissertation was communication in groups. I was most interested in the power of arguments. Before I describe what I proposed to do, I need to talk about a group-communication study on which I worked with Steve earlier in the year.

The data for Steve’s study was collected before I became involved. Forty or fifty people were presented with two different problems that were each described in two or three paragraphs. They were asked to choose between two alternatives in both cases. Their responses were recorded.

Then they discussed both problems as a group. My recollection is that there were fewer than ten groups. Each group turned in a recommendation for each problem. The discussions were recorded on tape. Someone transcribed these onto paper.

Steve and I then categorized some of the utterances in the discussions as arguments. The idea was to use statistical tools on the arguments to determine how powerful they were in producing the results.

For some reason Steve was only interested in one of the two problems. We spent a long time reading the transcripts and marking them up. He had somehow established a minimum level of agreement about what constituted an argument, and he claimed that our two evaluations had met this standard.

The final step was to find the correlation between the arguments and the conclusion. The statistical tools required that the items being counted are independent of one another. Well, most people in the social sciences would consider the groups independent of one another. If not, there would be almost no studies of groups. The individuals could also be considered independent, at least when they were filling out their original forms heard from other participants.

Steve, however, wanted to use a method called “conversational analysis” that someone at his Alma Mater, Indiana University, had advocated. In this method the arguments themselves were used to determine the sample size (always designated by the letter n). If you counted the groups, you would probably need at least one hundred of them to have any chance of getting a statistically significant result. Even if you counted individuals instead of groups, the sample size of this experiment was not very large.

However, if you set n based on the count of the arguments, and dozens of arguments could be identified in each discussion, it would be much easier. To me it seemed clear that the people in the groups were not independent of one another. It is even clearer that the arguments should not be considered independent of one another.

Steve had offered to add my name to the paper in which he summarized the findings. When I told him that I did not want him to do this, he asked me why. I told him that I thought that he was calculating his sample size wrong, and this decision made it much easier to get positive results. He responded that quite a few studies that used conversational analysis had already been published.

Believe me; I thought of a lot of sarcastic ways to explain my reluctance to be involved. I did not let any of them past my teeth, but my face may have betrayed how worthless I thought that this approach was. To say Steve was insulted would be a gross understatement.

What did interest me was the problem that he discarded. I don’t remember all of the details, but it involved a student who was challenging his final grade in a class. The grade was based on four tests. The letter grades for the tests, one of which was an F, were provided, as was the final grade assigned by the teacher. In the text it said that the teacher had not erred in his calculations. I think that the four test grades were B, B, C, and F, and the final grade assigned was a D.

In several groups, one enterprising member calculated the final grade the way that one would calculate a GPA: (4 for A, 3 for B, 2 for C, 1 for D, and 0 for F). By this method, the student had four grades with a total of eight points. The group member argued that the student should have received a C because 8 (3+3+2+0) divided by 4 is 2. In every group in which the argument was made, the group’s decision went in favor of the student. When it was not, the decision went the other way.

It was a perfect argument!

Well, like Pope Urban II’s famous speech that launched the first crusade, it was effective, but I would hardly deem it “perfect”. In the first place, the text of the problem explicitly stated that the instructor had not made this kind of a mistake. Furthermore, the 4-3-2-1 method is never used in grading individual tests because the range for an F is too great. What if the F on one test was, for whatever reason, a 0? If the B’s are 85’s and the C is a 75, the average grade is 61.25, a low D.

I thought that it might be interesting to explore why people in the groups capitulated to what seemed to me a poor argument. However, it was Steve’s data, and I did not have the gall to ask him for it to write a competing paper. As it was, he was very irritated with me already.

For the dissertation committee I also needed to recruit someone from outside the department. I planned to ask the professor who taught the psych class that I had aced and who explained about the orals. However, when I finally got around to asking him, I learned that he was on sabbatical. I really had no choice but to ask the psych department to provide a substitute. I sent the assigned professor a copy of my prospectus, but I had never actually talked to him!

For my study I wanted to use the “shift to risk” studies to which I had been introduced by Prof. Cartwright in the psych department at U-M. At that time at least forty papers had been published that used exactly the same set of twelve problems². The original study had concluded that groups made riskier decisions than individuals. Some later studies found that this shift only occurred on nine of the twelve problems. One problem showed negligible change, and in the other two the group decisions were actually more conservative.

In these studies the answers were always given in terms of a probability of success at which the riskier choice would be desirable. That is, people were asked to assign a number between one in ten and and ten in ten that represented the lowest chance for success for which they would recommend the riskier alternative. My hypothesis was (1) that each of the twelve problems had a natural set of arguments; (2) not all people are accustomed to making risk-reward decisions based on Bayesian probabilities; (3) these people can be swayed by arguments that they had not considered.

Steve asked the committee to determine whether this study was (1) important enough for a dissertation, and (2) really about speech communication. The psych professor immediately spoke up. He said that he could not address the second issue. However, he said that mine was a very clever approach to an important topic. Despite the fact that there had been a large number of studies to analyze these shifts, no one had ever proposed this mechanism. I was dumbfounded by this unrequested assistance, and all the committee members were very impressed.

Steve insisted that I add conversational analysis to my methodology in order to bring it under the rubric of speech communication. I agreed to do so, but as I was telling the committee this, I said to myself that I would never spend a minute on this study. It now seemed to me like a potential nightmare that might drag on for years.

I also realized that I really did not want to be a professor of speech communication. I loved debate, and, at least at that time, the only way to coach debate was to be on the speech faculty of a school with a debate program. I probably would need to fight for funding for the program, a task that I would not enjoy. Furthermore, because of my background in math and statistics, I felt certain that I would be asked to sit on every committee that evaluated a statistical study. I had heard about and even participated in a few of these, and I had yet to encounter one with which I would want to be associated. Here are a few examples.

My first postgraduate class at U-M had been an introduction to graduate studies. In it one of the students asserted that he wanted to go to an Arab country to study their television shows to determine how much they widespread and influential American shows were. He wanted someone to finance him to go to Arab countries, watch television for a few months, and take notes. For a PhD!No, he did not speak Arabic. When I asked if they had something like a TV Guide that he could analyze, he said that that would not be sufficient. He said that he needed to see how many camels there were and stuff like that. I am not joking.
At Wayne State I participated in a study in which the experimenter obviously lied about what was happening in other aspects of the experiment. The fact that I figured this out should invalidate his approach. It is absolutely not allowed. If I were on his committee, I would have made him start over with a new design.
I also read Juddi Trent’s dissertation. She found that the speeches in Nixon’s 1960 presidential campaign differed significantly in style and content from the speeches in 1968. It was a well-known fact (and one that she acknowledged in the first paragraph of her dissertation) that Nixon wrote the first set, and he employed a team of speech-writers for the second set. Her null hypothesis was that the techniques were the same. She then used statistics to prove that the two sets were not likely to be identical, something she knew for a fact before she started.

Faculty members have three main responsibilities: teaching, publishing, and serving on committees. I had little interest in the subjects I would need to teach and publish, and I would be considered an ogre by all of the graduate students. I decided to do something else with my life.

What I decided to do was to try to help Sue’s fledgling computer software company become more viable. Since Michigan was in the throes of one of its increasingly frequent “auto depressions”, we decided to move back to Connecticut.

1. While writing this I discovered that only a few years later Steve Alderton changed careers entirely. He got a law degree and then became (for almost three decades) an official of the federal government, a world traveler, and an artist! His obituary is here.

2. This is called the “Choice Dilemmas Questionnaire” (CDQ) published by Kogan and Wallach in 1964. Here is an example: “Mr B, who has developed a severe heart ailment, has the choice of changing many of his strongest life habits or undergoing a delicate medical operation which may succeed or prove fatal.” Participants are asked to read the statement and then imagine they are advising the main character. They are then asked to indicate the probability of success (from 1 in 10 to 10 in 10) sufficient for them to choose the risky alternative.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Author Archives: Mike

1948-1954 Kansas City, KS Part 2: My Mother’s Family

1971 January-February: Ft. Gordon, GA

1977-1980 Part 1: Dealing with Detroit

1980 Why I Am Not a PhD