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Watching ants make an ant hill in the afternoon sun, maybe, summer of 1947
Sometimes, finding something exciting to do even as a young lad during those late summer days in Lowell-town, required more get-up-and-go than I could muster, but fortunately,on that day, there were busy ants preparing a fine piece of ant architecture right there on the sidewalk in front of my eyes. You wonder, or at least, I wondered, who was in charge of this hurried orchestra of similar, black, moving parts. They were building what appeared to be a tiny facsimile of a flat-top, brown volcano having conical sides all leading down to several cracks in the sidewalk where busy, co-workers resided. Humans, when working in close quarters, inadvertently might bump into each other, but this crew of skilled professionals tirelessly continued their toil of love well into the afternoon and onto the start of a potential, summer shower, which threatened their efforts. But, the rain never did come, so their monument entered the annals of local history. Ants can teach us a thing or two, if only we would listen.
My older cousin, Paul (Pouchie) Ouellette, a gambling man
His family tenement was located on the corner of Moody Street and Austin just across the road from Sainte-Jeanne d’Arc Church and the presbytery of the Oblate priests, who administered the sacraments and said daily Mass for the local French-Canadians,“les canadiens”, who inhabited that gritty retail/residential neighborhood. To me, those environs always reminded me of the streets and alleys of Charles Dickens’ London suburbs, which were stuffed, cheek to jowl, with working-class social dilemma and distress.
Although I visited these haunts many times over the years, even today, I am left with nostalgia and a sense of far-away fear when this glimpse of yesterday crosses my mind. It was in those narrow, cobbled-stone streets and alleyways, the denizens of Lowell’s immigrant classes, where this tale took place. Nearby streets like Race and Cabot also provided the children of that neighborhood no relief from the dreariness of shabby, three-story-tall tenement blocks that were wedged tightly together in gray conformity.
The social situation was equally bleak for both of my older male cousins, “Pouchie” and “Soap”, whom I barely knew because of our large age differences. Apparently, young men often hung around these street corners in the early evening smoking, drinking, carousing, playing pool and drawing the attention of young ladies seeking to be noticed.
Although I was not in their social crowd, I had managed to learn through the grapevine that a favorite way to waste time and be amused was through a gambling game with historical origins dating back to the days of ancient Rome when Ortavian had been renamed Augustus, the first Emperor, circa 15 B.C. Apparently, Augustus had the intention of cleaning up the moral decay left by the Republic’s dying aristocracy. With much personal zeal, he banned the publication of Ovid’s racy poetry and also made gambling a social crime. However, not every Roman citizen or slave wished to be cleansed of moral turpitude and become pure and righteous. Apparently, the favorite gambling pursuit or game consisted of several players facing a wall where each player would toss a coin, probably a denarius, with the intent of having it land as close to the base of the wall and the pavement as possible. The player whose coin ended up closest to the wall won all the coins at play. According to the Emperor, all gambling including this one represented an affront to the gods since time and human skills were being wasted in a game of chance instead of creating something new.
Some two thousand years later, my own cousin, Pouchie Ouellette, was contributing to the moral decay in the fabric of our high, societal values. How might I help to redress these failings?
Early Experiments in Electromagnetic Theory
Unplanned experiments conducted in our Ludlam Street tenement were surprising little clues on how science and engineering were changing our lives quietly in the background.
The first such incident happened one morning back in 1952, one year before my dad died, as I prepared to to rev up the electric motor of my new toy Lionel steam locomotive. The train set’s circular track had been set up on a flat wooden table located next to our upright piano in the living room. A few additional fixtures had been placed along the track to simulate a railroad landscape. There, even, was a car crossing gate for safety’s sake.
Standing at the control center with my hand on the variac, which provided a means of gradually increasing the voltage delivered to the locomotive’s motor, I noticed that the train was not moving.
A power failure in the house, perhaps? No, all other electrical devices were working. So, why was I dealing with a dead train set?
Many philosophers over the years have left us with useful insights regarding the nature of the human experience. One such nugget of truth is that “we learn more from our mistakes than from our successes.”
As luck would have it, I was experiencing that reality right before my eyes when I noticed that a steel straight safety pin was lying across the center hot rail and outer ground rail of my train set, effectively shorting out the power to the locomotive’s motor.
The solution seemed quite simple, i.e., remove that safety pin as soon as possible, which I did. Then, Mother Nature provided me with another interesting fact that a hot safety pin would burn deeply into my thumb and index finger, which also happened.
Maybe, all of learning is painful, but never would I forget that lesson. Yet, electrical phenomena continued to fascinate me over the years.
A similar event had happened about one year before in that same living room, when as a dutiful, religious, Catholic boy, I had decided to place my metallic rosary beads inside the socket container cup (where a bulb might be inserted) of a standard table lamp. Snap, crackle and pop! I believe that I might have blown a fuse in that case. Life has hard lessons for us to learn.