What Do You Say To A Woman Who Steals From Her Own Children?
"A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband: but she that maketh ashamed is as rottenness in his bones." Proverbs 12:4
Introduction
What do you say to a woman who steals from her own children?
We have been pondering this question for over a decade, now.
Robbing the future seems so wrong on so many levels; and yet, when marshalling the arguments with which to convince someone to not steal from the future, one encounters profound philosophical issues that would challenge Sir Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell to articulate. The future doesn't exist. How can you have a crime without a victim?
We consider this page a cautionary case study of psychopathology and share our observations with others who may be in similar situations so that they may better recognize their peril and act anticipatorily.
We think perhaps the best way to introduce Eleanora Penny Salanave-Runyon to our readers might be by listing the aphorisms that Penny recited to her children as she raised them.
We start with the phrase "God helps those who help themselves".
As a child we thought that this meant that our mother believed in God.
As we grew older we realized that Penny was just channeling her mother - our grandmother, Mary Horvath - whom actually did believe in God and who was an incredibly strong-willed woman.
Now that we have reached our full maturity we think Penny interpreted this as an excuse to not help people in need. Why should she? "Let God deal with it", she told herself.
This attitude is, we think, the precise logical complement of Pascal's wager. Pascal argued that a rational person should assume that God exists. Penny, in her arrogance, argued the exact opposite.
Our advice is to study the actions of those whom use this phrase carefully to see whether they are using the phrase to challenge themselves to higher levels of achievement or whether they are only using it to cultivate a facade of virtue and to lull those about them.
Penny's second favorite aphorism was "Beggars can't be choosers".
As a child we were puzzled by this - our only experience with beggars was in books like Robin Hood or Treasure Island - until we moved to San Francisco and for the first time in our life we saw people actually begging.
Strangely, we never saw our mother give anything to any beggars. If Penny ever donated anything to any organization it was in exchange for a tax deduction which she made full use of.
Penny had acquired her nickname, 'Penny', as a result of her habit of going up to people as a little girl and asking them for the pennies in their pockets.
Did it ever occur to Penny that she, herself, had begged for pennies? Apparently not.
As an adult we think that Penny interpreted this observation as an instruction - in order to maintain control, keep others poor and do not share what you have.
Our advice is, again, to study the actions of those whom use this phrase carefully to see whether they are using the phrase to describe an unfortunate state of affairs or whether they are actually stating a policy.
Penny's third favorite aphorism was "Not my problem".
With this four-syllable mantra, Penny dispelled all responsibility for the problems she created for others.
As Penny grew older this moved upwards in her pantheon of witty sayings until it reached Number One and, in response to almost any situation, Penny would say, "not my problem".
Penny encouraged her children and everyone around her to take this approach to life. "That is not your problem!", she would tell us, angrily, when we asked uncomfortable questions.
We think that accepting responsibility is a hallmark of maturity. Responsibility is, fundamentally, the ability to respond to circumstances - to see what needs to be done, and to do it, without needing to be told what to do, motivated by excellence.
We think Penny shirked her duties to others and she encouraged others to shirk their duties as well.
Although an ability to set aside all other concerns and to focus upon only one problem at a time is admirable, in general, we advise people to be on the lookout for people who say "not my problem" and to regard them as cancer cells in the body politic.
Real problem solvers, in our experience, carry some sort of note-taking device with them and use it to manage their lists of outstanding tasks. Real problem solvers rarely dismiss anything without thought.
We did and do not regard Penny Salanave-Runyon as a solver of problems so much as she was a shuffler and a shifter and a maker of problems for others.
Which leads to our next aphorism ...
Penny liked to "teach people a lesson".
It was not clear which fountain of wisdom she was tapping when she taught people her lessons. We never saw her teach any classes and we do not think she knew what a 'syllabus' was or how to spell it.
We think when Penny said "teach them a lesson", she meant "retaliate against them for threatening my power and control".
We are all for continuing education but we never found Penny to be a very good teacher of anything.
Penny would place herself ahead of her children. On such occasions she would say to us, "You after me first". We have no idea where she learned such a strange idea. Perhaps her grandmother, who cared for her when she was young and with whom she had an uneasy relationship. The broken English of the quote also suggests this.
Strangely, one of Penny's favorite saying when she was younger was "Actions speak louder than words". This, too, came from her mother - our grandmother - and so it was solid gold.
As Penny grew older, however, she stopped quoting this. We think this is because the number of things that she wanted to conceal from us, her children, and Leon, her husband, grew and grew, and she did not enjoy being reminded of the gap between her words and her actions.
We encourage everyone to be aware of potential gaps between words and actions. Integrity springs from consistency. Corruption can be recognized by the incongrueties and discontinuities. People who do what they say and say what they do are to be treasured.
After our grandmother's death, Penny's favorite aphorism became "Nobody cares." She told us this repeatedly.
Our response was to point out that she cared, otherwise she would not be so determined to convince us that nobody cared. Penny did not like our response. This may have marked the beginning of the end of our relationship, as mother and child.
However, Penny was correct: Nobody cares. Or, rather, people care; but there are only so many minutes in a day and only so much time and money available for activism; and we are all under attack by vast forces intent upon keeping us distracted, and penniless, so that we all need to pick our battles carefully.
We think the source of this bit of wisdom was Herbert Runyon - whom, it was said, had prior experience at dealing with probate, and was guiding Penny.
Based on information and belief, Herbert Runyon was the person who influenced Penny to steal the deed to 112 Washington Terrace - causing our grandmother's untimely death when she discovered the theft.
Based on information and belief, that would make Herbert Richard Runyon accessory to at least two deaths.
But nobody cares. <Yawn.> Hope we aren't boring you.
Perhaps the strangest aphorism Prenny ever recited to her children was "If you're going to steal, make sure it's worth going to jail".
Where did Penny learn that? We do not know. We assume Penny knew someone who went to jail over some petty amount of money. The CPA who trained her later did some time in an Arizona penitentiary; we wonder what he might have taught her.
We think Penny - trained as a bookkeeper and accountant but for some reason averse to going all the way and becoming a certified public accountant - was in an excellent position to cook the books but also in an excellent position to detect someone else cooking the books. And so our best guess is that she turned in one of her coworkers - and that this time, she was channeling the police, not her mother.
We think Penny was averse to becoming a certified public accountant because she had some skeletons in her closet. More on that, below.
So: What do you say to a woman who steals from her own children?
Perhaps a better question would be: Why would a woman steal from her own children?
Phrased that way, obviously, the answer is: because those children have something that their mother wants.
Now we are getting somewhere. No philosophy is required. The motive is simple and ancient: greed. And an embarrassing lack of self-discipline.
It's possible that dementia played a role, as well - when our mother was doing these things, she already had a conservator.
But where was the conservator? It turns out the conservator was also tainted by greed and a lack of self-discipline.
But where were the lawyers? They were as thick as fleas when the money was being distributed. Where are they now?
The lawyers aren't answering questions, but it seems possible that, yet again, greed - and an embarassing lack of self-discipline - was again at fault - and this time, there is no dementia to hide behind.
Although it embarrasses us to say this, our mother, Eleanora Penny Runyon-Salanave, was addicted: to money, and, through money, to power, and control. Eleanora Penny Runyon-Salanave was a greedy and power-hungry woman who had been raised as a single child and did not know how to share; not even with her own children.
If her caretakers and lawyers had trouble distinguishing her post-dementia greediness from her pre-dementia greediness, we infer ... it was because they accepted her greed, and shared it, and, as a consequence, were blind to the fact that it grew excessive.
Our mother's addiction to money led our mother to steal her own mother's (our grandmother's) will ... steal her own mother's (our grandmother's) deed to her own house ... rob her own son - that would be us - of his inheritance, and a place to live ... and, only six weeks after cleaning out her mother's (our grandmother's) safe, behind her mother's (our grandmother's) back, our mother caused her own mother's (our grandmother's) untimely and unnatural death, when her mother (that is to say, our grandmother) discovered the empty safe, and dropped dead, from shock.
It is the purpose of this website to analyze our mother's conduct for the warning signs of her pathological behaviors that were surely there, and to share those warning signs with others.
Observing the sort of companions that our mother was keeping in her last years, it is entirely possible that this pathological behavior was some sort of requirement for acceptance into some sort of club of elderly criminals - not unlike being required to run over a pedestrian that your gang leader points out, at random, as part of a gang initiation.
Our mother desperately wanted to be respected and accepted by the upper crust of society. What if the upper crust were all criminals? What would our mother be willing to do to achieve their respect? We will explore this possibility - white collar criminal gang activity - as well.
Other people create websites about their hobbies or in memoriam to their long-lost beloved. It falls to us to create a website about the most perfectly awful woman we have ever had the displeasure of knowing intimately. We honestly think that with our mother's passing, the world has become a slightly better place, in a two-steps-forward-one-step-back sort of way. So it goes.
0. Outline
An approximate outline of this analysis would go something like this:
- Penny's parents
- Penny's childhood and adolescence
- Penny's boyfriends
- Penny's abortions
- Penny's first marriage
- Penny's children
- Penny's second marriage
- Penny's Unitarianism
- Penny's third marriage
- Penny's business ventures
- Penny's friends
- Penny's death
- Penny's estate
1. Penny's parents
As a child, I always thought that my grandfather was my mother's father. And my mother allowed this delusion to persist.
As I grew older I learned that at one time my grandmother had been married to a man named Farkas, who had been my mother's stepfather, and I thought, OK, Grandpa was her father, but he and Grandma had a falling out, she married this Farkas guy for a while, then divorced him and married the father of her child, and all ended well. My mother allowed this delusion to persist as well.
And then one day after my grandmother had died and I was in Connecticut, cleaning my grandmother's house, I found a piece of art created by my grandfather, in high school, in Wisconsin, a thousand miles away from New York City and maybe 18 months before my mother was conceived - and i realized that my grandfather was not my mother's father.
So who was my mother's father? Wondering this, I realized that I had never seen my mother's birth certificate. My mother had used the nearly three thousand miles separating the East and West coasts of North America as an excuse to insulate my brothers and I from her parents, our grandparents, and, I gradually realized, in so doing, she had sought to keep us uninformed and disconnected from our own family members and our own history.
My mother had personal files but this all ended up in the custody of my older brother, Thomas Childers, when he became our mother's conservator. There has been no turnover of the contents of the files that our mother had for each of us. Lacking evidence to the contrary, it would seem that my older brother either maliciously destroyed these materials to keep them out of our, his younger brothers' hands ... or my older brother is retaining these records for some reason he cannot justify - emotional blackmail is likely.
As custodian of these materials, Thomas Childers would be the person who best knows where Eleanora Penny Runyon-Salanave's birth certificate is. Locating that missing document would answer a lot of questions.
I'm not much into DNA testing and ancestry research, but somewhere there may be a man or a woman who shares perhaps 25% of my genetic inheritance but who is entirely unknown to me. If and when such a person is identified, then I will know with a high probability who my mother's father was.
2. Penny's childhood and adolescence
To the best of my knowledge - lacking our mother's missing birth certificate - Eleanora's name, at birth, was probably Eleanora Simon - because my great-grandmother's surname was Simon - pronounced, in the Hungarian style, "Shimon" - so that it was not until I saw my greatgrandmother's gravestone, in Bridgeport, that I first realized that what I had always heard as 'Shimon', was actually spelled 'Simon'.
When Eleanora was a child, during World war II, children were put to work begging for pennies, which contained copper and were melted down and turned into bullets. My mother was so good at begging people for spare change that her nickname became "Penny", and, when she turned 18, she petitioned the court to have her middle name legally be made Penny.
However, in the interval, I think that young Eleanora Simon had become Eleanora Farkas, then Eleanora Simon again, then Eleanora Horvath - my grandfather's name. And she was probably calling herself Eleanora Horvath when she left home to go to college, in Arizona - that would have been around 1953 or 1954.
However, before my mother left for college, evidence indicates that she had at least one and maybe two abortions. My mother, herself, one said that she had had three abortions in her life, and I know that one of the abortions was in West Germany - when she was a newlywed, with my father, when he was in the US Army, during the Occupation, after World War II. But that leaves two abortions unaccounted for.
Some people - women - would say that it is none of my business. However, if I am not permitted to inquire into the basis for the premeditated murder of not one, not two, but THREE older brothers, then, really, who is allowed to ask questions? So, I suggest you go put a sock in it.
As long as we are talking about surnames ... what about this 'Salanave-Runyon' nonsense? Does this have any legitimacy? I don't think so. My mother's stringing the surnames of her last two husbands together, in a desperate attempt to retain the name recognition and prestige associated with the former name, while trying to position herself to harvest the prestige attached to the latter name, simultaneously, was just plain sad. Learn from my mother's mistake. Don't do it. It just confuses people. The relevant legal records are all filed under either 'Salanave' or 'Runyon'.
But if such a strategy had any validity and people made a habit of listing every name they had ever used - together, in chronological order - I think my mother's full name would be something like 'Eleanora Penny Simon-Farkas-Horvath-Childers-Salanave-Runyon'.
3. Penny's boyfriends
My mother never breathed a single syllable about anyone before my father, Dallas Childers.
4. Penny's abortions
Before my mother left for college, evidence indicates that she had at least one and maybe two abortions. My mother, herself, once said that she had had three abortions in her life, and I know that one of the abortions was in West Germany - when she was a newlywed, with my father, when he was in the US Army, during the Occupation, after World War II. But that leaves two abortions unaccounted for.
Some people - women - would say that it is none of my business. However, if I am not permitted to inquire into the basis for the premeditated murder of not one, not two, but THREE older brothers, then, really, who is allowed to ask questions? So, I suggest you go put a sock in it.
As I said, above, my mother never breathed a single syllable about anyone before my father, Dallas Childers.
But obviously someone fathered those two unaccounted-for abortions during my mother's adolescence.
My guess is that Penny probably allowed herself to get knocked up by some nice boy, whose mother, or grandmother, totally rejected her as not being good enough, leaving my mother with a huge inferiority complex that she compensated for by making everyone else feel like shit. My guess is my mother allowed herself to get pregnant on purpose with the intention of shoehorning herself into a life of leisure, but that her would-be future in-laws saw right through her.
It's entirely possible that the young man was brought to heel by his mother's threat to disinherit him ... leaving Penny with a burning desire to join this new sisterhood she had discovered: to accumulate a great fortune, throw her weight around, and threaten people with disinheritance, too. More on that, below.
These are pretty harsh things to say about one's own mother. It's tempting to say that I am an ungrateful child. But all of my differences with my mother relate to how she treated my stepfather, and my grandparents - her own parents. This is discussed, below.
My mother's total refusal to address these topics while she was alive, really, left those of us with an interest in the facts with no alternative but to fill in the gaps with educated guesses.
This theory also explains why my mother worked so hard to avoid having us visit our grandparents every summer; my mother did not want her mother telling us any stories about her as a girl or a young woman.
If there is a moral to this, it is to tell your children the truth so that they don't end up following false trails in a desperate attempt to figure out What Really Happened.
5. Penny's first marriage
Penny went off to college in Arizona, and met her future husband Dallas at the University of Arizona. They fell in love. They graduated. They got married. At least, that's the story.
In reality, Penny had applied to the University of Arizona because she wanted to get as far away from Bridgeport as possible. Penny had supposedly chosen Arizona because she had psoriasis, and needed to get more sun. At least, that's the narrative we were given, as children.
In reality my analysis is that Penny's psoriasis was stress-related and that she moved 3000 miles away from her home in Bridgeport to escape the stress - which was probably related to the events and circumstances that led to her first abortion, and, perhaps, her second abortion, before she even left Bridgeport to go to college.
(It seems possible that my mother might have cultivated something of a reputation as 'easy', with all the difficulties that ensue.)
After graduation, Dallas joined the US Army and went off to Germany. Penny came along.
After Dallas and Penny returned from Germany, Dallas fathered Thomas Childers, my older brother. Penny and Dallas then lived in Bridgeport, with my grandparents; Thomas was born in Bridgeport.
Something happened - some territorial thing between my grandfather and my father - and Penny and Dallas left Bridgeport ... dallied in Texas, where Dallas was from ... and ended up back in Arizona.
It was probably in Texas that my mother met my paternal grandfather, Dallas, Senior, who was a mechanical engineer and was not rumored to have a lot of tolerance for nonsense.
My guess is that he sized up his son's new wife up as a New York city girl with not a lot of spine, said as much, and earned Penny's undying enmity for being blunt and honest. So it goes.
My sense is that I reminded my mother of Dallas, Senior ... they say, I take after him. It probably didn't make her too comfortable.
Dallas acquired employment with the United States Geological Survey and was assigned to monitor river flows somewhere in northern Arizona - Lee's Ferry, I think. I don't think they had electricity. Penny was not enthusiastic. I think Dallas discovered, then, that Penny, my mother, was a hard-core city girl.
Dallas and Penny then moved back to Tucson, where I was born.
At some point Dallas - who had subscribed to Playboy magazine, which was brand new, and daring, and mailed in a plain brown wrapper - got mixed up with a minx, at work. Based on information and belief, Penny - who was a very vindictive woman - retaliated against my father by fucking one of his friends, coworkers, or neighbors - I'm not sure which - and things blew up. My younger brother's eye color and blood type were different from mine and my older brother's. Oops.
In fairness to my dad, it might have been the other way around - Penny was fucking around while Dallas was at work, and so Dallas set out to get some satisfaction of his own. Regardless, Dallas ended up moving in with his minx from work - her name was Toni - and chaos ensued, at work.
Penny's parents drove all the way out from the East Coast, with what I think may have been a brand new Rambler automobile - built like a tank - so that Penny was not marooned, without a car, in Tucson. It was the first time I had ever met my grandparents! That might have been one of the best times in my life. I'd never felt like someone cared that much about my wellbeing before - fact.
As soon as our grandparents had left town, though, Penny strapped us all into our seats, drove over to Toni's place of residence, and made a big scene out front, making sure all the neighbors knew that Dallas had abandoned his children - although, looking at it from an adult's perspective, it might be more accurate to say that he had been driven away by my mother's vindictive behavior and no longer found her attractive.
It was 1966, and Penny was a single mother, with three boys.
The next few years, we were all latch-key children; the first of what would soon become a trickle, then a stream, then a flood, then, a deluge, of children, at home, after school, without supervision.
It was Thomas' job to come and pick us up from the kindergarten, one block away from our house - but I can tell you, he did not like this duty. Conflict ensued - and when he asked, our mother gave Thomas permission to physically discipline us, by punching us on the shoulder, when we did not do what he told us to.
Essentially, Penny deputized her oldest son, Thomas, to fill in for her missing husband.
In retrospect, there are some decidely irregular aspects to the relationship between my mother and my older brother. If we were to look for the roots of this irregularity, they would be here - and even earlier, in the relationship between a woman, and her firstborn.
Which would explain why Thomas, and Penny's next husband, Leon, would always be in conflict, every day, until the day Leon died.
Dallas ended up going to Afghanistan, ostensibly as part of a loan program to the Afghan government, where our government loaned their government hydrological engineers to help the Afghanis locate, design, and build flood control systems. From what we know, now, this was probably a dual purpose mission, where participants were also collecting information on mineral deposits for the United States government, unbeknownst to the Afghan government - and so my father's military experience may have been a factor in his being offered the opportunity to get out of town for a few years. We didn't see our father for another decade.
Penny joined a group called Parents Without Partners, but, as I recall it, it was a group of people who all had PTSD and were barely functioning, themselves. The group had no leadership and it had no spirit, either.
It was probably someone associated with Parents Without Partners who clued Penny in to the Tucson Unitarian-Universalist Church; or maybe it was the other way around, and it was someone in the UU organization who pointed Penny to Parents Without Partners.
It was through matchmakers at the Tucson Unitarian-Universalist Church, that Penny met her next husband - Leon Salanave.
But before we go there, first, we need to talk about Penny's offspring.
6. Penny's children
Penny had a three abortions - she said they were all boys. So we will call these Son #1, Son #2, and Son #3.
In 1958 Penny bore Thomas Dallas Childers, my older brother, and #4 - although Tom, naturally, thinks of himself as #1.
Thomas always had his own room except for a very short period when he had to share a room with me, when he was very young.
Thomas was raised, carefully insulated from I and my younger brother, and so I am going to say that he was raised as an only child, even though he had two younger brothers ... and his behavior reflects this.
In 1962 Penny launched moi, Richard Alexander Childers, the so-called "middle child" - but really, I am #5. I am three and a half years younger than Thomas. This did not stop me from competing with Thomas - sometimes, successfully. When I was only three or four years old, Tom was diagnosed with sibling rivalry. So I must have been quite a rival.
In 1963 Penny delivered John Wesley Childers, #6, the baby of the family - my younger brother. We were less than two years apart.
My sense is that if there had not been witnesses, Penny would have tried to abort John Wesley - who in my opinion may have been the smartest of us all, as he acquired an advanced amateur radio license (KK6IX) at a relatively young age, but never received the recognition he so desperately craved, from his mother, and his oldest brother (WN6ARL), who had also been a ham radio operator.
I say "we were less than two years apart", because my younger brother, John, died, under mysterious circumstances, in August, 2020. Fentanyl is suspected - as is murder. My older brother's role in these events has yet to be determined. More on that, below.
7. Penny's second marriage
Poor Leon! He had the misfortune to be Eleanora Penny Simon-Farkas-Horvath-Childers' second husband.
Penny's second husband, Leon Salanave, was born and grew up in San Francisco. Leon was a native Californian and a native San Franciscan - a rare bird, in this state and this city of transients and social climbers.
Leon once showed me the house he had lived in when he was just a wee lad; it was in the Duboce Triangle, He told me that when he was a child he thought the outcropping of rocks at the top of what is now called Corona Heights Park, was occupied by trolls.
Back then - probably around 1920 - Castro Street must have represented the western boundary of San Francisco - everything beyond that was sand dunes, wind-stunted trees, ice plants and occasional upwellings of water.
Later, Leon's father, Edward Salanave, bought a house on 43rd Avenue, near Geary Street - at the very end of the Geary streetcar line - and it was from the house of 43rd Avenue, that Leon went to Presidio Junior High School, a few blocks away; Galileo High School, across the street from the Ghirardelli Chocolate Factory; then, to University of California, at Berkeley, where he acquired a master's degree in astronomy.
As a newly minted research astronomer, Leon was just in time to teach naval officers, celestial navigation. After the war, Leon worked for the California Academy of Sciences, in Golden Gate Park - he was one of the people who built the Morrison Planetarium projector, which, in the days before computers, was no trivial task.
Somewhere in there, Leon had the bad luck to meet a disloyal woman.
People who are born or who grow up in San Francisco, unless their parents are from another country, probably don't realize that San Francisco is a gateway city for people coming from all over the world. But the fact is, most of the people in San Francisco are just passing through.
This seriously impacts native San Franciscans' ability to form meaningful relationships. Almost everyone who might be a prospective mate has roots a thousand miles away or more. The moment one's relationship hits a rocky spot, one's partner packs up and retreats to another state, another time zone, or even another continent. This makes it very difficult to grow up normally and have a normal family and may go a long way towards explaining the turbulence surrounding California's family courts, to which the rest of the nation looks to, for guidance.
So, anyway, this woman married Leon, and had two children with Leon, but then, ran away with her dentist - who took her, and Leon's children, Camille, and Jonathan, back to Idaho, with him, leaving Leon crushed, and with what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder.
Leon's PTSD manifested in an inability to focus. He was, like many of us, these days, distracted, by intrusive thoughts and memories - which he remedied, by making a list of things to do, each morning, to help him stay focused - a very useful habit we could all stand to copy.
Leon moved away from San Francisco and the house he had bought for his young family, on Seventeenth Avenue, in easy walking distance to the California Academy of Sciences, and relocated to Tucson - where he taught astronomy classes for the University of Arizona and did research on lightning for the Department of Atmospheric Physics and tried not to think too much. Leon spent his Saturdays at the lightning laboratory, out in the desert, drinking Rainier Ale and eating pretzels and distracting himself with research.
There, in Tucson, Leon had the bad luck to be introduced to my mother, Penny.
Perhaps it was not all misfortunate. Leon desperately missed his own children. My younger brother, John Wesley, filled a void in Leon's life, that his divorce and the loss of his children had left. John and I, as well as Thomas, desperately needed a father figure in our lives.
Leon taught us boys stuff that Penny hadn't a clue even existed. Such as, how to fix a flat bicycle tire. How to start a fire. How to car-camp. How to build a tent, using just a tarp, or two, and a single rope. How to cook over a fire. How to wash pans with sand instead of soap. How to make hot chocolate from powdered milk. How to roll up your sleeping bag, tight.
How to use a red filter over your flashlight to preserve your night vision. How to operate binoculars, and telescopes. Leon built us a treehouse. Leon introduced I and my brothers to the electromagnetic spectrum. Leon introduced us to giant telescopes, and the people who built and operated them. Leon taught us the physics of lightning.
Leon introduced me to scientific discourse - I was introduced to Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead after finding their books in his library. Leon was a good influence, and I miss him. His parents must have been exceptional people.
In 1970, Leon's father, in San Francisco, passed away, and Leon was faced with the question of what to do with the house he had grown up in.
Penny wanted very much to live in San Francisco. Penny wanted to work in the Financial District. Penny read the Wall Street Journal and aspired to be involved in high finance. Penny got her wish.
In February, 1972, we left Tucson, and moved to San Francisco.
Which is unfortunate, because Tucson, and Kitt Peak Observatory, are the birthplace of the FORTH programming language ... and if we had remained, I have no doubt that I and my brothers would have all ended up deeply involved in the local computing, solar power and electronics industries.
San Francisco did not offer us kids much in the way of added value. San Francisco is cold. The streets are hilly and unfriendly to bicycles. The houses are packed together.
Dangerous children were being bussed to local schools, just then, and local children were being bussed to dangerous schools. We arrived right in the middle of all that.
The San Francisco Unified School District was substandard, covering material I had learned the year before at my old school - I was quickly skipped into the next grade - a maneuver that my mother boasted about but in reality was not in my best interests and which ultimately destabilized my education.
In retrospect, the move to San Francisco was all about Penny's professional development. Basically, we all had our lives torn apart to satisfy the whim of a rootless cosmopolitan who missed living in New York City.
As luck would have it, there was a house for sale, on Seventeenth Avenue, in the Sunset District, only a few blocks away from the house Leon had bought after his first marriage. And so we ended up moving into 2047 17th Avenue, San Francisco.
(More to come ...)