The IQ Test
As a 12-year-old living in Bakersfield California, my Catholic Mom sent me to Garces Junior High. Unbeknownst to my parents, the administrators gave all incoming young men an IQ test. There was not room for all 80+ of us in one classroom, so it was made very clear to us that the “dummies” were sent to the “other” classroom. Those of us not included in that group were initially organized in seating according to the IQ results. There were six rows with 7 desk-chairs in each. I was initially ranked #2. I didn’t understand but thought this was sort of cool. The one guy with a higher score was named Kenny Larkin, and we became friends. Like me, he hated sports. Unlike him, however, I could outrun everyone else among all 80 young men – except one.
We were strictly segregated at Garces from the young women, who were taught by another monastic group, this one comprised of black-veiled nuns. We rarely saw any of the girls, and only at a distance. My Mom and stepfather were shocked to learn from me about several horrifically savage beatings* that Brother Gerald and Brother Remy inflicted on us boys; the Christian Brothers were a non-priestly monastic organization running the boys’ side of the school. Mindful of this, and of that IQ test, my new stepfather cajoled my Mom over a year and a half into letting me attend a public high school, Bakersfield High. He knew this school also had a nascent version of AP classes called the “Point 5 Program” in place. Every class was numbered: English 9.4 for freshman college prep, English 9.3 for kids expected to go into business or auto-mechanics, English 9.1 was for special ed. English 9.5 was the much harder class intended for the smarties in the school. I learned it was designed to encourage talent. It is the reason I ended up attending the University of California at Berkeley, and ultimately, earning a PhD.
The Rope
Another side effect of testing: at the beginning of each school year, the boys were always tested in P.E. This had nothing to do with sports, but involved running a 440-yard loop, racing to the stop of the stadium… and climbing a rope. Yes: a 22-ft/7-meter rope. As a 14-yr-old I was terrified of that rope – I had never climbed one before. We had to start from a sitting-in-the-dirt position, then climb and touch a bell at the top while being timed with a stopwatch. Full of adrenaline, I figured out how to use my legs to help about a third of the way up. When I came back down (not knowing how not to burn my hands) the coach stared at his stopwatch and ordered me to do it again. When I came down the second time, he gave me an odd look and said that this was the fastest time he had ever recorded any kid doing on that rope. Ever. After all the testing was done, we were separated into three groups: the Jocks, The Fatties (they were actually called that), and the In-Betweens. The Fatties did things like throw medicine balls back and forth to each other. I was assigned to The Jocks and this was all about sports – which was all they did. I had never played football, never played baseball (I didn’t even own a mitt), and never, ever, dribbled a basketball. This was the beginning of a terrible year for me; I consistently got C’s in P.E. The first day we started the basketball cycle, the coach had each of us dribble from mid-court and go in against five guys in the Key to take a shot. I had to be instructed (with transparent irritation) how to dribble the ball, and then how to shoot the ball. One kid just stood there at the mid-court circle and hesitated, then did a half-court “swisher” – right in the basket the first time. The coach never looked directly at me again. I was in misery every day for P.E., made worse by my fear of being seen nude in the showers (that stepfather turned out to be a pedophile when I was 11 years old and my Mom remarried). The next three years were the same: test, get thrust into The Jocks class, get lousy grades, cringe with my acne cysts showering in the nude every day, five days a week. The one semester we had “Health” in my Junior year was an incredible relief to me... and I learned most of the other guys also.
Through much of the rest of my life, however, I wondered about what that IQ partitioning did mentally to all those boys graded as “dummies” at Garces? The dyslexic kids? What was the life-long impact for those at BHS left in “The Fatties” class… for the rest of their lives?
“Old 160”
Fast forward a decade and a half. I had a PhD and was traveling for work with the US Geological Survey. I just finished a training course in science management in Monterey, CA, and on my way home to my family in Virginia I stopped in Long Beach to see my sister. Barb had arranged for a float plane to pick me up and take me to Santa Catalina Island off the coast. She was on a 32-ft sailboat with her boyfriend at the time, surnamed Rogers. My mother had warned me that “Rog” was a successful attorney and very proud of the fact that his IQ was tested at 160. He boasted of this frequently enough that Mom actually referred to him as “Old 160.” The amphibious plane landed in Catalina Harbor and Barb met me at the dock. She took me and my suitcase to an inflatable Zodiac and motored me out to the sailboat. For the next two days we motored around the island while Barb and Rog dived for “bugs” – illegally-harvested lobsters. My job was to stand at the side of the boat to receive the grab-bag as they would bring one up every so often. We only raised sails for the traverse back to Santa Barbara at the end of the trip. Rog seemed to be probing me – and watching me closely – the entire time; I sensed a weird vibe but didn’t know what to do about it except answer his questions. I later gathered two things from Barb: (1) She and Rog had already decided to part company as a couple, and (2) Rog had somehow gotten the impression that I was super smart. A PhD does seem to fool some people. He also understood that I was an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ – and he had difficulty reconciling those things. Finally, as we were docking back in Santa Barbara, Rog looked over to me and said this: “Jeff, I admire you. In 30 years, I will be a lonely alcoholic, surviving until I die on this very boat – if I’m lucky. You, on the other hand, will be happy and surrounded by grandchildren.”
The lesson here seems obvious to me, as it was to Rog.
3-D Chess
My first three years in the US Geological Survey were spent in the Denver field office. I was part of three geophysics branches of the USGS, all centered in rented office space on Colfax Avenue. I was the last young PhD hired in a huge hiring spurt that lasted from 1971 to 1975. One of those other newly minted PhDs I will call Gary. Gary was super smart and made sure that everyone knew it. Then after three years I was invited to move to the USGS National Center in northern Virginia and became a deputy science office chief. This led several of my former colleagues to feel some apparent jealousy (I learned this later; I’m often very naïve). Once while back in Denver for a technical meeting, Gary invited me over to his house for dinner, and I accepted. As soon as dinner was over, he pulled out a very interesting game – a 3-D form of chess. Gary’s wife immediately started to complain to him about mistreating his guest (apparently this had happened before). The game had multiple vertical levels and different pieces than traditional chess, with different movement rules – which he quickly explained to me, the novice. One could move a piece horizontally, vertically, and on diagonals. “Let’s play,” said Gary. His wife again told him that this was inappropriate, but Gary insisted. After about 30 minutes, I said “I think that’s checkmate.” Gary stared at the boards for almost 20 seconds. Then he stared at me, without saying a word. I felt increasingly uncomfortable and suggested that I should leave because I had an early technical meeting the next morning. Gary, wordlessly but still staring at me, just walked me to the door. I was never invited to dinner there again. I learned later that he and his wife divorced soon after.
But here’s the thing: I’m not smart enough to beat anyone at chess. However, this time I had help in the form of inspiration, guidance that I listened to and followed. After no contact for ~20 years I learned that Gary had retired because he had developed Parkinson’s Disease. I called to express my concern and sympathy, and we talked for a long while. Our earlier friendship was renewed with just that call. Gary was a humbler person, and I hope I was also.
So, what’s important?
“This Man is GUILELESS!”
In 2002 I received two phone calls at my office in the USGS National Center. By this time, I had returned from two mission chief assignments in Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. Both calls were from colleagues to notify me that the position for chief scientist for volcano hazards had opened up. “You should apply for this,” both told me. I talked with Louise, who was working on Capitol Hill at the time, and whose work-week-with-commute was 63 hours (we counted them). “By all means,” she said. It would require relocating to the Pacific Northwest, but we had visited Washington State during our obligatory, State-Department-required Home Leave from Saudi Arabia years earlier – and we both loved it. I applied… and then forgot about it. Two months later the selecting official suddenly called, said he was in Reston, and wanted to interview me. What I thought would be a 15-minute conversation lasted more than two hours. He said that quite a few people had applied, and the list had been whittled down to just three short-list applicants. A week later I got a call telling me that I was selected. I called Louise. “By all means,” she answered. There followed a horrific six weeks, where I had to wind down four separate research projects, pack up an office and a laboratory, prepare and sell our house, find a house, and move with one of our sons and several birds across the continent… while the DC Shooter was still at large (he was caught, just 7 miles from our daughter’s house, when we were passing through Indiana).
There were two other applicants for that job, however. One was selected later for another management position in Denver. The other had been the chief of a science team in the National Center but had left that position under mysterious circumstances. He was later selected to be the volcano program coordinator. One of my senior scientists, who knew him well, remarked that this new program coordinator was the smartest man he (Carl) had ever encountered. At the time the USGS was experimenting with misbegotten thing called “matrix management.” In this system I had line authority over about 120 scientists and support staff – but the program coordinator held the purse-strings and had a say in how the financial allocations were spent. The Golden Rule is Him what got the gold, rules. Initially we worked together equably enough, but he apparently decided that I didn’t have the jets to swing a chief scientist job. He decided that I wasn’t as smart as him because I would not follow Machiavelli’s “The Prince” as my guiding management philosophy. I’m not joking here – that really was the issue. So… why had I been selected over him for the chief scientist position? He began to try to manage behind my back, confusing the heck out of everyone in my office. I confronted him several times, and he would back off with some excuse like “I’m just trying to help you!” I tried hard to think the best of him and went out of my way to be open with all my information. At one program council meeting I passed something to him privately. He stared at me, then turning to the rest of the people present said in a loud voice and a nasty smile “this man is guileless!” He did not mean it as a compliment. As I thought about this, however, I concluded that I would not want to be any other kind of man. Machiavellian game-playing at other peoples’ expense is not something I would ever want for my legacy. To do nasty things – force people into Directed Reassignments to drive them out of the USGS just to make a point – was something he recommended. “If they don’t fear you, they won’t obey you,” he told me several times. I’m not making this up.
Eventually I talked with my own senior executive supervisor, as this was causing increasingly serious confusion among my staff. They were getting orders from the program coordinator to stop whatever they were doing and do a task for him… without bothering to notify either me or my subordinate scientists-in-charge. I was surprised to learn that my senior executive manager knew all sorts of interesting things about this program coordinator – like, why he had been forced out of a chief scientist job earlier. Eventually, with the intervention of several senior executive managers, rules governing and limiting the program coordinator’s behavior were written and signed – to his transparent chagrin. Interestingly, a few years later the USGS abandoned matrix management as “unworkable.”
The program coordinator by this time found himself “glass-ceilinged” – he had been forced out as a chief scientist by misbehavior once before, and now was being spanked again. He was fearful of rotating back to a scientist position, certain that people he had abused before would want to get even with him (he was right – I got quite an earful after he left). The guy left the USGS for a dean position at a small distant university. On the last day we were together, he sat across from me at the conference table in my office to discuss some funding issue. As he was preparing to leave, I mentioned to him that I was resigning my chief scientist position and returning to research; I didn’t say why. We both knew that my job was a 5-year rotational management position, and that I had done my five years of 55-84-hour weeks; Louise had repeatedly suggested to me that I might want to consider getting a life for a change. The program coordinator stared at me for a full 20 seconds, trying to fathom what I meant by this – what was the strategic move I was pulling here? Finally, as someone who had coveted my position for five years, he ground out “why are you telling me this?” I responded, “Professional courtesy, I suppose.” He stared at me icily for another very long time, then without another word put his notepad in his briefcase and just walked out. I never saw him again.
This man was very, very intelligent. But he based his personal management style, the way he dealt with other human beings, on all the wrong principles. I won the years-long fight with him, but not because I was smarter than he was. Many people had ferocious opinions of him as a manager and as a human being. I just happened to be the last one in a long line of people he had tried (and often succeeded) to hurt.
Where is this Going?
Several times during my initial years with the USGS, Louise would ask me if I worked for the CIA? “No – why,” I would ask? Her brother, a pilot, had told her that a job requiring me to travel all over Saudi Arabia, Europe, the Far East, Australia, and South America – was the perfect cover for a spy. When other people have asked me if I’m a spy, I’ve just said no.
There is some reasonable basis for this thought, however. Once in Saudi Arabia a non-descript man walked into my office, flashed his US Consulate badge at me, and asked if he could ask me some questions. “Sure,” I said. “We have heard rumors that there was a gun-battle in Hail, in the central Arabian Peninsula. My colleagues and I cannot find meaningful information about this, but we are aware that you travel all over the country for your work. Have you heard anything?” In fact, I had – two of my staff who came from Hail told me that the ‘Amir’s office there was abandoned and covered with bullet holes. He took notes and thanked me – and did not leave a business card. Something like this happened to me when I first got to Venezuela. The Ambassador at the time told me that a person on his staff wanted to talk to me. Again, a very non-descript individual came into the Ambassador’s office. He said that he understood that I would be traveling all over Venezuela in my job as USGS mission chief, leading the mapping project for the jungle-covered, roadless southern half of the country. He reminded me that there are Alcabalas – Guardia Nacional checkpoints – on all roads between major cities in Venezuela. As diplomats, they did not have paperwork that would get them through those checkpoints. One had to have a reason to pass through them, especially a non-Venezuelan. “Yes, this is correct,” I replied. “Would you please take photos of roads and bridges and checkpoints in your travels, and share them with us,” he asked? I stared at him. Sure, I thought – poison the trust that our host agency, the C.V.G., had for the US Geological Survey? Right.
BTW, I never saw that man again.
A year later, after we had seen several deaths in both Puerto Ordaz and the jungle, and had had a number of close calls, a USGS colleague in the USGS National Center sent down several programable, “Fly-Away” HF radio transceivers. I had no idea how to use them (Louise and I are licensed HAM operators now). I asked around in the Embassy in Caracas and was told to go to the offices of the “Political Section” – but the Political Section offices on the 6th floor, not the 5th floor, which is behind a gold-leaf-lettered, fancy glass door. The Economics Section that I was vetted to (I was a formal State Department employee with Ambassador-grade of FS-12 during the three years I was there), was on the 4th floor and the Commerce Section was in the 3rd. I took the elevator to the 6th floor, and when it opened, I found myself facing a blank wall with a steel door in it. The doorhandle had a cipher lock. A man came out, said he understood I needed some help with a radio, and took me downstairs to the secluded little park on the embassy grounds. After looking around carefully, he showed me how to set up an HF antenna, and how to program a frequency into the 25-kg radio. He then gave me a small, torn piece of paper, with a 10-meter-band frequency penciled in on it and told me to call him at that frequency when I got home. I flew home to Puerto Ordaz, 700 km away, and set up the radio on my apartment terrace. I called the frequency he had given me, and he answered. “OK, it works. Please lose that piece of paper now. Good luck in the jungle,” he concluded, and hung up.
I never learned his name. He took a personal risk to help another human being who was at serious risk working in the jungle. He didn’t have to do that – but was just being a good guy to help another human being.
OK, I’m not CIA, and I’ll tell anyone. However, I do not tell anyone (except Louise) what my IQ is. I got that number from a high school councilor’s folder with my name on it as she discussed potential scholarships with me. I’ve given invited lectures at annual MENSA meetings, but no, I am not a member of MENSA. And here’s the thing: that IQ number is not important. Your speed to the top of the rope is not important. Comparing yourself to another person – read those stories above – leads to nothing good. There is always someone smarter than you, wealthier than you.
Just try to do good; compete with yourself if that floats your boat. If you live your life right, help other people when you can, you will do just fine when you are forced to go go toe-to-toe against the guys who think they are smarter, or better, or tougher. It’s really just their problem with their own self-worth.
You don’t need to buy someone else’s problem.
~~~~~
* My best friend in elementary and junior high was Marcus Espitia, whose father was Mexican and whose mother was African American. We had defended each other against bullies in Saint Joseph elementary school for years and started Garces together. One day in 7th grade Brother Gerald was pacing back and forth in front of the class, declining Latin nouns out loud from a book he held. Brother Gerald was a huge man – 240 lbs/110 kg. My friend Marcus had lifted the lid of his desk above where his books were kept, blocking Brother Gerald’s view. From there he was shooting spitballs at the guy sitting across the aisle from him. I watched as Brother Gerald slipped down into that aisle without changing his monotonous repetition. Suddenly he leaned hard on the top of Marcus’ desk, trapping his head inside the desk, cutting off his air. I can still vividly recall Marcus’ arms and legs thrashing around, his head locked in the desk as he tried to free it. Then – still intoning the Latin – Brother Gerald lifted the lid with the hand holding the book, and with his open right hand hit Marcus in the side of the face so hard it physically lifted him out of his seat. Marcus actually hit the adjacent wall first, then slid to the ground, stunned. Still droning on, Brother Gerald proceeded to pick up each book in the desk and throw it – as hard as he could – at Marcus’ face. One. Two. Three. Four. Marcus finally got up off the floor and ran to the door to escape… with books bouncing off him several times before he reached it and exited. Brother Gerald then strolled back to the front of the class and continued reading out the Latin declinations to us – without any vocal interruption through this entire process.
We all just sat there, frozen in our seats.
