Because Coco’s Restaurant closed effective February 13, the next  ‘First Tuesday’ breakfast will now be “Second Tuesday” and will be held at Denny’s Restaurant at Fletcher Parkway and Navajo Road, one block east of the Coco’s location.   ‘First Tuesday’(now 'Second Tuesday') is an informal gathering of retirees who meet for coffee, conversation and breakfast on the first Tuesday of every month at 9:00 AM. Some a little later, and that’s OK.

Typically a dozen or more show up, never more than twenty so far. Recent breakfasts have been attended by Lee Roper (a ‘regular,’ who initiated the idea of a regular, informal breakfast for interested retirees), Bob Steinbach, Tom Scanlan, Joanne Prescott, Bob Peck, Wayne Harmon, Marie James, Lee Engelhorn, Chuck Park, Bill Givens, Bill Bornhorst, Phebe Burnham, Pat Higgins, Ed Dobson, Dick Lantz, Shirl Collamer, Virginia Steinbach, Mary Ann Beverly, Ray Resler, Dorothy Ledbetter, and Erv Metzgar.

Poppy Fields, Snow Capped Mountains, a Kasbah in an Oasis.
   
      By Lee Roper

During spring of 2001, Barb, Marie James and I took a thoroughly enjoyable tour of Morocco. So much of the world has become so homogenized that the culture in the country you went to see no longer exists except in the ethnography museum. That is decidedly not the case in Morocco. The cities are modern and crowded but in the villages you will find traditional Moroccan culture. I particularly enjoyed sitting in sidewalk cafes to people-watch. They drink mint tea, coffee, colas or water. Alcoholic drinks are only in the tourist hotels or in one of few liquor stores in the city. Sitting in cafes is strictly an activity for men, except in the city where there might be a few women tourists or young working women. Most women are at home with the children or at the mosque. On the streets many women wear the traditional jellabas. The extent to which they cover the face will vary from no cover to everything covered including the eyes.

Highlights of the trip were: a camel ride in the sand dunes to watch the sun rise, reminiscent of that dramatic opening scene from the movie "Lawrence of Arabia;" a step back in time on a walk through the souk (market) in Fez; the architecture with its beautiful tile work; and lunch at the La Mamounia Hotel in Marrakech.

We couldn't have asked for a nicer group of people than those on our tour; however, if I had it to do over again, I would arrange accommodations for the night of arrival and play it by ear in a rental car. Except for cities it is a safe and easy country for driving. Otherwise you are in the constant company of your fellow tourists and on such a tight schedule you can't get away from that group.

Meet me at the Kasbah!!

Teaching ‘Americanese’ to Chinese
   
    By Don Scouller

This September Joan and I had a wonderful experience in China. Huazhong University of Science and Technology recruited us, along with 35 others from Tucson, to teach their graduate students about American culture and familiarize them with our language. We had been to China before when Joan went there in 1980 to make a film about life in China for her sabbatical project. We went back in 1986 and again in 1989. But whatever we thought we had learned about China before was wiped out by the new China we found at Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

This is considered their equivalent of M.I.T., and is certainly one of their major seats of learning. Our students were all graduate students, either there for a Masters or a Ph.D., and as I learned later had been working in their chosen fields for some time. In other words, they were sophisticated adults who had been admitted to grad-school after serious competition. It speaks well for their Communist Party masters that they recognize the need to comprehend and speak American-English if they are to become the leaders of China in the next fifteen to twenty years.

All Chinese kids begin learning a foreign language about the third or fourth grade, and finish high school with eight years of Russian or German or English. But their teachers were all Chinese, and as you know, there are sounds in every language that require the use of certain muscles and breath control that are hard to learn as an adult. So all the jokes we tell about the Chinese switching of l’s and s’s are true, but that is minor compared to the really strange pronunciations we experienced.

So, as native-speaking Americans we were charged with exposing them to basic American speech, and to introduce them to "life in America". My morning lecture was to about one hundred students in a very nice lecture hall. This was a three hour session, then we had a three hour break and in the afternoon I met with a small class of twenty-six in a smaller room. Joan had the opposite schedule, small class in the morning, large lecture in the  afternoon. The large hall had a console at the front that housed a VCR that automatically played videotapes in either NTSC or PAL formats. There was a computer with Windows 95 as the OS, an audio amplifier for wireless microphone and an overhead projector that had a video-camera head that looked down at a platen that allowed the use of transparencies or opaque material. The computer, VCR and O-H Projector all fed into a ceiling mounted video projector that filled a twelve-foot screen. I was impressed with all this because Joan and I had prepared about forty 8x10 prints each and I had made over one-hundred slides of our American life. We also had made a compilation of our best videos showing our experiences traveling around the world.

So I was pleased that our preparation would pay off. But then hard reality faced us. Sometimes the wireless microphone wouldn’t work, or the video-projector was set to very high contrast which ruined the video or the O-H projector. Then we would send our Teaching Assistant running for the in-house technician who would fumble around until a fix found, or not. Our TA’s were recent graduates of Foreign Language Department majoring in English. Joan had an officious young man who would have liked to run her program for her. He rapidly learned that nobody dominates Joan (I learned that fifty-one years ago.). My TA was a pretty little girl who was generally helpful in translating for me, but beyond that was useless.

We met with our small class every day for 21 days. It was an exhausting gig. We walked a third of a mile to our classrooms which were on the fourth floor of a building that was not air conditioned and the temperature was in the mid 90’s, as was the humidity. Our first class met at 8:00 AM until 11:30, followed by a three hour break during which we returned to our room, kicked off our shoes, retreated into a warm tub or shower and then collapsed. We returned at 2:00 and taught until 5:30 PM

I had 17 women and 9 men. During those sixty-three hours we really had a chance to bond. They were motivated and I knew how to teach. I say that because some of the people we traveled with from Tucson were businessmen or lawyers, even a NYPD undercover cop. And they floundered at first, but soon became good teachers. Remember, we were not there to teach English. They already knew how to read and write almost as well as our Grossmont students.

Joan and I love to play Charades. And we have no problem with clowning around and acting out ideas. I am a johnny-3-note when it comes to singing, but I taught them "I’ve been working on the Railroad" "Auld Lange Syne", "It had to beYou". and a couple of dance routines. Joan came up with changing the words to "This Land is Your Land" to fit the Chinese boundaries. But when she wrote the line "from Sinkiang Province to Hong Kong Island" her students corrected her, it should be "to Taiwan Island."

We teachers had agreed in our contract with the University that we would not teach religion or talk about politics. This was hard, because when we got into discussions someone would bring up something that was political. "What do you think of Chairman Mao?". We would answer that he would be remembered in history as a great man for China". I had told them that I was a soldier in WWII, in the Philippines. I was asked if I hated the Japanese. They are very much aware of the horrors the Japs inflicted on the Chinese and the rape of Nanking. I was asked why did the U.S. try to invade China during the Korean War. But although they often asked probing questions about our culture and our lifestyle I never detected any hostility. I think most of the teachers formed emotional attachments with our "kids". I know Joan and I did.

Off campus we were regarded with mild curiosity, and usually a smile from us brought a smile in response. We went to major department stores that match anything you can find in San Diego. And they were for the local people, not for tourists. The "New China" is rapidly becoming an entrepreneurial capitalistic/socialist state. The old guard Communists are dead or out of power, and the students we worked with will take China a long, long way.

Retiree’s Write:
  
   Lee Brown writes:

We moved to Sun Valley, Idaho, full-time in 1996. In 1998, sold the condo and acquired our current home just south of Ketchum (visitors have included Wayne Harmon, Bill Bornhorst, and Shannon O'Dunn). Kathy volunteers (Hospice and chairs the Community Library Board) and works (store in town named "Ketchum Kitchens.") My life alternates between water research and play time. Most of the work centers on aquifer modeling along with well testing and water analysis. Currently I have two standing contracts, one with The Nature Conservancy (as their consulting hydrologist) and the other with Blaine County to design a water-quality monitoring network.

My most recent publication was by the University of Idaho (April 2000) entitled Hydrologic Analysis of the Big Wood River and Silver Creek Watersheds. I am working on another trade book connected to my old Ford Foundation grant I received while at Grossmont. This is a non-fiction work providing a ground level view of how water issues affect the small river communities scattered all over the western states entitled The Legacy of Lewis & Clark: Bridges and Barriers for Western River Communities. I've talked with Island Press but nothing concrete until it is more along the way.

With respect to recreation, Sun Valley is heaven. Located in the heart of Sawtooth Range of the northern Rockies, we cross country ski from our house, the world famous Sun Valley ski lifts are 5 minutes away. We snow shoe, hike, fly fish, and I've even returned to upland bird hunting (my family was not supportive but enjoys Blue Grouse, pheasants, and Hungarian Partridge). It's a wonderful and varied community and we've enjoyed decompressing, meeting new friends, and still remaining active. Every year we go to Italy in spring and my Italian is almost passable.

I guess the main message is -- 30 years of doing any single thing is enough. Get out and explore new vistas, it's wonderful.

With warm regard,  Lee      leebrown@cox-internet.com

Biblio-Files

by Tom Scanlan

Important Reminder: The Grapevine strongly encourages book reviews from its readers. If you’ve read a book you’d like others to read, send your review to The Grapevine, Grossmont College, 8800 Grossmont College Drive, El Cajon, CA 92020 or e-mail it to  tom.scanlan@gcccd.net   Also, if you’ve written a book you’d like to have reviewed, please let us know. I do not give star (*) ratings to books by our retirees but would be happy to include the review in the Grapevine.

  The Game, Ed Dobson (1^st Books, 1999)

Another book by ‘one of our own’, this is Ed Dobson’s third of four novels. I’d classify it as popular adventure and partly a war thriller. I would add, though, that there’s a lot of interesting background in the book that tells of a boy, Kazu, growing up. The boy, a Japanese immigrant to California just prior to World War II, attends high school and is leading a somewhat normal life until he is interned with other Japanese in Arizona, following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The story is told using flashbacks from several points of view, mostly the boy’s after he has grown up and is now a prison camp commander for the North Vietnamese.

If you’re wondering how he made that unusual transition, this is a story with more than a few twists and turns. It will keep you turning the pages. The strong point of the novel is the development of the protagonist, Kazu, but the story brings in lots of interesting background ranging from growing walnuts to card gambling. In fact, the novel takes its title from a card game that the American prisoners of war can play in order to escape from their Vietnamese captors. The stakes are rather high. Win the game and you go free. Lose the game (the odds strongly favor this outcome) and the prison commander takes his shotgun to your head.

So how did a nice boy like Kazu end up in a spot like this? What is his fate and the fate of his prisoners? Read it and find out.

You can download an electronic version or purchase a paperback copy of Ed’s text at the 1^st Books website, http://www.1stbooks.com.

  Shiloh, Shelby Foote (Random House, 1952)***

Many of you are probably familiar with Shelby Foote’s classic three volume set, The Civil War, A Narrative , a highly praised popular history. Or you may be familiar with him through Ken Burn’s Civil War series on Public TV. It doesn’t matter. This little novel stands on its own as a brief, fictionalized account of one of that war’s decisive early battles, near Shiloh Church along the Tennessee River.

This bloody, closely fought battle was the largest in our nation’s history up to that time, involving over 100,000 combatants and both generals Sherman and Grant. For those of you who aren’t Civil War buffs, I won’t give away who won that battle (neither does Foote until nearly the end). What I will say is that you won’t want to put this book down until you see how it comes out.

The book is especially unique and delightful in that it’s written from the point of view of individual combatants, both enlisted men and officers, and alternates by chapter between Confederate and Union soldiers. Foote has each account overlap just enough to keep the story line coherent and smooth, using dialogue marvelously to accentuate the differences and add to the authenticity. It’s a wonderful telling because it puts you right there on the battlefield. Cannon shells woosh overhead and musket balls and grapeshot buzz around you, ricocheting off trees and bushes, sometimes thudding into an unfortunate comrade. You feel the terror and the panic.

There are heroes (and cowards) on both sides. Shelby Foote, a southerner through and through, has resisted the temptation to favor the men in gray over the men in blue. What he has done is to take the essential facts of this battle and written a story that will heighten your appreciation of all the men who fought in that war, as well as the causes for which they fought. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and hope that you will, too.

  A Beautiful Mind, Sylvia Nasar (Simon & Schuster, 1998) ****

This marvelous biography of the mathematical genius and Nobel laureate John Nash won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. It’s now back on the best-seller list and is the basis of the film with the same title, which most of you probably know has won eight Academy Awards nominations, including Best Picture. The film’s pretty good but if you really want to get into this person’s life, read the book. The author is a former New York Times economics correspondent and is currently the Knight Professor of Journalism at Columbia University.

John Nash was raised in Bluefield, West Virginia, a small town in the coal-mining region of that state. He was somewhat of a social misfit from the beginning (what we’d call a nerd today) but his parents were supportive and his teachers eventually realized that John had a most unusual talent in mathematics. He was awarded the PhD in 1950 from Princeton at the early age of 22 for his innovative but controversial thesis on non-cooperative game theory.

In spite of his eccentricities and social awkwardness, John eventually married one of his MIT students, Alicia Larde, in 1957. The following year, during the late stage of her pregnancy, John’s mental state became seriously unbalanced. This led to a series of hospital confinements and treatments followed by temporary remissions, but his mental state continued its downward spiral into schizophrenia. The series of personal catastrophes that accompanied his disease and his long road to recovery make up the remainder of his remarkable life story. It’s a story that’s deep in places and often tragic, and may not be every reader’s cup of tea, but it will captivate you once you begin reading it. And by the end of this book you will feel like you knew this man personally and lived through his ordeal with him.

So softly death succeeded life in her,  
She did but dream of heaven, and she was there.          
               …John Dryden

  Ruth Camp

Ruth camp passed away on February 20 at the age of 77.  She was born in Helena, Montana on March 14, 1924, the youngest of three children.  She moved to San Diego in 1943, and to Spring Valley 11 years later to the home she built with her husband, where she resided until her death.  She is survived by her husband, Avery, of nearly 60 years and two sons, a brother, eight grandchildren  and one great-grandchild. 

Ruth worked at Convair for 5 years before joining the staff at Grossmont College in 1962 at its original Monte Vista High School site.  She worked as supervisor of admissions at Grossmont College for most of her 22 years with the district before moving to Cuyamaca College.  She retired from the district in 1984 as the student  registrar at  Cuyamaca College.   Ruth is warmly remembered by her colleagues on both campuses as very dedicated and competent as well as a friendly and caring person.

                            ******************************************************* 

Arla Cox       

Arla Cox began her employment with the Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community College District on July 1, 1974 as a part-time Senior Lead Clerk in the Biology Department at Grossmont College. She worked in various part-time positions with the college until November 10, 1975 when she was hired full-time as a Typist Clerk, Intermediate in the Biology Department at Grossmont College.  After serving in the Typist Clerk, Intermediate position for several years, she was hired on October 22, 1980, as the Biology Technician in the Biology Department at Grossmont College. She continued working in this position until she retired on May 1, 2001.

The college community was deeply saddened when Arla passed away on June 16, 2001, at the age of 63. She was an extremely conscientious technician who consistently dedicated herself to ensure the smooth running of the biology labs.

(Editor’s note: I’d like to thank Cathie Norris for providing the information and sentiments above. The following paragraph is from professor Ruth Botten of the Biology Department  I regret there were no pictures available.)

Arla was a highly valued member of the Biology Department classified staff for her competence, her attitude of cooperation and support for the goals of community college education, and her friendships with many coworkers. She is acutely missed and remembered with great fondness by all the members of the Biology Department. To the many student assistants who worked in the biology lab over the years at Grossmont, Arla was a kind and understanding supervisor. Having returned to school to obtain her G.E.D. and then graduating from Grossmont with her A.A. degree while raising her own children, Arla was a special inspiration to many young single mothers working to complete their education.

Arla passed away surrounded by her loving family, after a brave struggle with   cancer. She is survived by her brother Bill Krizan of Bremerton, WA, her brother   Ron Krizan, of Las Vegas, NV, and her sister Dorothy Miller, of Walnut Grove, CA. She is also sadly missed by her seven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, her sons Victor Cox, of Santee, Ron Cox, of El Cajon, and Scott Cox of El Cajon, as well as by her daughters Stephanie Wilson of  Palm Desert and Melody Kohl of Chula Vista.

                                  *******************************************************

Dick Johnson

Dick Johnson died on December 12, 2001 of a sudden heart attack at the age of 66. Dick had been a librarian at Grossmont College for 35 years and had just retired in June, 2001. He is survived by his wife Jaqualyn and two brothers, Don and Ken, both living in southern California. Services were attended and soliloquies given by Grossmont College librarians Tom Foster and Curt Stevens, as well as his older brother. Other GCCCD retirees attending included retired librarian Tom Hepp.

Dick was born in Alhambra, California and grew up in El Monte, California. He studied both at UCLA and USC with majors in art, education and librarianship. He had served in the Army Reserves.

He was involved in acquisitions and cataloging at the Grossmont College Library and was very influential in introducing computer technology there. His colleagues remember him as a soft-spoken, gentle man who was always helpful and always sympathetic. He was recently honored with emeritus status by his colleagues (see article this issue).

Dick had many interests, including nature photography, and some of his photos were displayed in a slide show at his memorial service. At that service, some of his poetry was also read, including the following:

Pelicans, Lindo Lake

Twenty-some white pelicans
Feather to feather forming a snow-bright flotilla
Gliding silently on the dark water.
Long slender necks,
Long yellow bills
Bending and dipping gracefully into the water
In unison,
Bend…dip…rise…bend…dip…rise,
As though in rhythm to music,
A soundless ballet
Choreographed an eon ago.

Twenty-some white pelicans
Gliding silently on dark water,
Giving thought to ancient oarsmen,
Pulling quietly in unison across the sea.

(Editor’s note: Richard sent me a copy of this poem (dated November, 2001 at Lindo Lake, Lakeside, California) in a letter dated December 5, 2001, asking if I’d personally critique it for him. I am honored, Richard. It reflects the gentleness in your soul. It is a gift to all of us who knew you.)