July 11, 2006: Colorado & Kansas

We said goodbye to Mark and Kathy shortly after 7 this morning in order to make an 8 o'clock tour of the Denver Mint, which is marking its hundredth year of coin production. We watched the manufacture of "copper" pennies (made of zinc with a copper coating), "silver" coins (made of nickel, zinc, and copper alloys), and "gold" dollar coins (to which manganese is added for color). After blanks are punched out, coins larger than a penny go through a process of annealing, quenching, burnishing, rinsing, drying, stamping, and upsetting; upsetting gives coins a raised edge, makes them stackable, and slows wear and tear. Coins have a usable life in circulation of between 20 and 40 years, while paper money lasts less than two years on average.

The Denver and Philadelphia Mints are the only ones to make coins for circulation. At their current rate, each will produce nearly nine billion coins this year, 60 percent of these pennies. Because each penny costs 1.3 cents to make, one wonders when we will finally put a stop to this money-losing game and simply eliminate the disposable one-cent coin. (Two other facilities mint coins for collectors and investors: uncirculated and proof coins in San Francisco, and gold and platinum coins at West Point, New York. Paper money and postage stamps are made by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington, DC, and Forth Worth, Texas.)

As you surely know, the mint is currently producing commemorative quarters for each state, but you may not know that they will begin making presidential dollar coins, one for each dead president, after they finish the quarter series. As our guide explained, living individuals cannot appear on US coins, bills, or stamps. Tommy immediately whispered to us, "That's good, because I don't think George Bush deserves to be on a coin." He has without a doubt picked up on our political leanings.

Driving south on the "Ronald Reagan Highway" into Colorado Springs, I saw a sign for the evangelical Focus on the Family Visitor Center, and curiosity compelled me to pay a call. The building is a good introduction to the slickness of the right-wing media empire Dr. James Dobson has built.

After I was welcomed and signed in, I was offered all of their numerous magazines (each with a corresponding website) in a hall full of displays on the various social and political tenets and missions of the church. Besides various galleries featuring framed portaits of the great man and his lieutenants, there is a big bookstore, a big empty theater continuously playing Dobson interviews, and a big crowded indoor theme park based on a long-running cartoon series called Odyssey, in which every problem has a Biblical solution. Because of his ability to mobilize acolytes, Dobson has become even more influential than Billy Graham was in his heyday. The license plates in the parking lot came from all over the central US, revealing the reach and clout of his ministry.

We also visited Colorado Springs' beautiful Garden of the Gods.

We walked among the eroded red rocks,

watched climbers tackle them,

and did a bit of climbing ourselves.






Yep, that's Tommy up there. He just loves to climb!






The rest of the day consisted of a very long drive (8 hours) on a very straight road (I-70) through very flat states (first Colorado and then Kansas, where we entered the Central Time Zone and set our clocks ahead one hour). Without a tornado to break the monotony, the boys might have been utterly bored, but they kept each other thoroughly occupied.

We're fortunate to have sons who have a close, amicable relationship. I don't recall having had such a fraternal relationship as a child, and I wish I could go back and change this somehow. But I comfort myself by observing how well our boys get along and entertain one another, and how much real affection they have for each other. Not that things don't devolve into the occasional spat under the stresses of boredom and confinement, and I suppose all bets will be off when they reach the teen years, but for the moment they are at a delightful age, constantly talking and playing together.

They're well-traveled boys, so they've had good training for this trip. Besides the Southwest, the Northeast, Florida, and Hawaii (Tommy twice), they've been to the Caribbean (Tommy twice), and Europe (Tommy twice). Three years ago, we drove around Europe together for nearly a month, visiting friends in Holland, Poland, the Czech Republic, Germany, and Switzerland, and touring France and the north of Italy. Tommy can even lay claim to having been to Alaska, although he was in his mother's womb at the time.

Cousin Mark got his law degree in Topeka, so he's made the trans-Kansas run many a time and knows it well. As we passed Salina, we recalled one of the less-flattering names he told us it has been given: "Saliva." Mark had suggested we might stop there for the night, but we chose to drive just a bit futher, to the historic town of Abilene, about which more tomorrow.

July 10, 2006: Centennial & Denver

Kathy cooked some fluffy pancakes and eggs for us this morning. After breakfast, the boys played in the back yard with Molly the dog, pictured here with Abby. A few games of air hockey, a load of laundry, and a blog entry later, we were ready for the Children’s Museum of Denver. Driving north on Broadway into hazy downtown Denver, I could tell by the dense traffic how much the city has grown.

The colorful museum is sandwiched between I-25, the aquarium, the South Platte River, and pretzel-shaped Invesco Field, which used to be the New Mile-High Stadium. We had lunch at the museum with our boys, who had a fine time dressing up as various small animals and climbing through caves and over mountains.

Afterwards, we walked to the banks of the river and looked across at Elitch's amusement park, where I rode my first roller coaster, an old-fashioned, clanking, clattering, wooden behemoth. (The park is a Six Flags franchise now.) The boys listened to the screams emanating from the various thrill rides and speculated about which one was most likely to cause Tommy to throw up. Next time, we promised them.

We bought gas at $2.83 a gallon and drove back to Centennial on I-25 in slow-moving rush-hour traffic. (Is that an oxymoron?) The traffic should improve soon, however, since extra lanes and a train line are about to open. The corridor is lined with dozens of high-rise business complexes.

Kathy made taco salads for dinner, and we relaxed on the patio with beer and conversation. The evening's temperature was perfect. Thanks, Mark and Kathy, for your hospitality!

July 9, 2006: Albuquerque, Los Alamos, & Centennial

Before we left Albuquerque, we took a quick tour of the old town, a district of narrow streets and traditional adobe buildings, where the city was founded exactly 300 years ago. Like its more famous counterpart in Santa Fe, the old town surrounds a charming, tree-shaded plaza. A Catholic Church, San Felipe Neri, is the centerpiece of the square. Nearby stand the aquarium, the botanic garden, and the very muddy Rio Grande River.

We left Route 66 at the junction of I-40 and I-25, where we turned north toward Santa Fe. The adobe-colored and turquoise-trimmed overpasses of the interchange reminded us that we were in pueblo country. It was unfortunate that we didn’t have time to visit the Indian pueblos of northern New Mexico, particularly Taos, but negotiating the winding mountain roads and high passes of this route would have been prohibitively time-consuming and would not have allowed us to reach Denver tonight. Debbie and I have visited these pueblos before, however, and bought some nice jewelry there.

Near Santa Fe lies the mesa-top town of Los Alamos, where my father worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. He was an assistant chief engineer, responsible for installing what project members called “the gadget” in its casing. His mother joined him there, and they lived and worked in cabins and Quonset huts for two years. You can see one of my dad's project badge photos here.

After the war ended, Dad participated in Operation Crossroads, also known as the Bikini test (from which we get the name of the swimsuit). He built a collector to sample the atmosphere after the atomic blast and rode with it on a plane that flew through the mushroom cloud produced by the bomb.

People sometimes ask me how my father felt about helping to build the first nuclear weapons. The short answer is that he believed them to be a necessary evil which brought the war to an abrupt close. He figured they saved more lives than they cost, since an untold number of people – both Japanese and American – would have died in a full-scale invasion of the home islands.

People also ask me how I feel about the bomb and my father’s wartime job. My answer: Japan was essentially defeated before Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed. The nation was so weakened that the US could have successfully sued for peace without resorting to the utter destruction of two more cities. In any case, the use of nuclear weapons upon civilian populations was and is absolutely unwarranted and unjustifiable.

But I say all of this with the benefit of hindsight. In 1945, the US was desperate to end the conflict, and it didn’t have good intelligence on Japan’s military capacity. Moreover, as with all new forms of weaponry, American leaders were itching to deploy them, demonstrate their effectiveness, and scare the hell out of their enemies.

My father, like the vast majority of his generation, held no personal animosity toward the Japanese. My parents later hosted a student from Japan for two years and attended her wedding in Tokyo. Debbie and I lived and worked in Japan in 1987 and 1988, and we were married there to boot. Most of my current students are Japanese, but I'm understandably hesitant to tell them of my father’s role in the war. When I do, however, they never seem to hold it against me, recognizing that the past is the past and that we cannot choose our relatives.

In Los Alamos, it was raining cats and dogs (“No,” shouted the boys, “hippos and elephants, sharks and whales!”), so we retreated to the Bradbury Science Museum, operated by the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which contains a casing manufactured for one of the original atomic bombs. When my family visited the area back in the 60s, the casing was mounted outdoors and my mom took a snapshot of my dad (in his characteristic bowtie) and my brother, sister, and me (the one waving) sitting atop it. (According to museum staff, the "Fat Man" in the photo below was painted white to prevent corrosion, and the "Little Boy" is a reproduction.)

The museum focuses on the history and research of the lab, charged with maintaining the nation’s nuclear arsenal. It must do so without detonating any nuclear weapons, since the active US test program was discontinued by President Clinton in 1992. The lab accomplishes this by subcritical component testing and one of the largest agglomerations of supercomputers in the world.

Like the lab, the museum is stuck firmly in the Cold War: it addresses in great detail the whats and the hows of nuclear and thermonuclear bombs, but not the whys. It simply assumes that the U.S. needs a “safe and reliable” nuclear deterrent, without a trace of irony in the juxtaposition of those words. By "safe and reliable," the lab and museum just mean that the bombs should go off if and only if the button is pushed.

Tommy and Danny found the films of nuclear explosions and quizzes about the effects of nuclear radiation quite absorbing, pardon the pun. Only Tommy, however, seemed to fully grasp the grave import of what he was seeing.

Due to the gully-washing rain we encountered, we decided to skip nearby Bandelier National Monument, which contains Pueblo Indian ruins. But the rain did give our car a wash, which was much needed (along with gassing up, at $2.99 a gallon). By the time we returned to Camel Rock, near Santa Fe, the sky had temporarily cleared.

Beyond Las Vegas (New Mexico) to the north, we entered gently rolling prairie, where the torrential thunderstorms continued most of the way to Denver. Heavy raindrops smacked our windshield in a furious tattoo and lightning flashed all around. We listened to the conclusion of From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, a book on tape, and then the boys watched Wallace and Grommit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit on our laptop. Here’s a memorable quote from the book: “Some people spend all their time on a vacation taking pictures so that when they get home, they can show their friends evidence that they had a good time. They don’t pause to let the vacation enter inside of them and take that home.”

After dinner in Raton, just south of the Colorado state line, Debbie offered to switch places and drive a bit, but the wind and rain and approaching darkness unnerved her, so I took over again. Debbie prefers to drive when the sun is out, the skies are clear, and the road is dry, straight, and flat; that should describe Kansas in a couple of days if the weather forecast is accurate. Debbie's driven a bit in California and Arizona, but I've driven about 95% of the way so far.

We passed Colorado Springs, headquarters of the huge and very creepy conservative Christian cult known as Focus on the Family. Colorado Springs is also home to Garden of the Gods, a city park unlike any other city park in the world, filled with towering, uniquely-shaped rock formations. It was one of Debbie's favorite spots on the cross-country trips her family took when she was a child, but it was too dark and wet and late to stop, so we promised ourselves we'd visit later in the week.

Cousin Mark and his wife Kathy and daughter Abby welcomed us to Centennial, a southern suburb of Denver, at 9 p.m. Mark is an attorney, Kathy is a nurse, and Abby is going to be a high school senior. Her sister Emily is currently in Belize on a church mission.

I have many fond memories of childhood visits to Denver to visit Mark's family. His folks, my Aunt Gerry and Uncle Ed, passed away last year. Gerry was a schoolteacher and, as the eldest sister, a repository for a lot of the genealogy and lore on my mom's side of the family. Mark sent me two big boxes of her archives after she died: photos, documents, memorabilia, and more. Guess I'm the repository now.

Gerry, by the way, is short for Geraldine. She's the one on the right. Her sister, my mom, who is named Mildred, is in the middle, and her other sister is Harriet, on the left. (They don't name 'em like that anymore!) The three were born in Akron, Colorado, a small town on the plains in the eastern part of the state, in the 1920s.