Wednesday, October 31, 2012

A Tale of Two Campuses

  I spent my first 26 years on the East Coast—the first 17 of them in New York City and nine in the Boston area.  Anyone who has lived in both knows how dissimilar they are.  New York is a frenetic, stressful, 24-hour-a-day place. Boston is relatively staid and laid-back, rolling up its sidewalks at 11 pm.  After a youth spent in New York's maelstrom, I really cottoned to Boston's relative tranquility.

  For the next 56 years, my home has been in California—49 of them in the Bay Area, the remaining seven, in two periods, in Los Angeles.  LA is a turbulent, can-do city, full of color and zest, having the tone of Hollywood.  San Francisco is more decorous, having the tone of its business district.  After spending my initial four years in California at a company in hurly-burly LA, I was glad in 1960 to move to the more-measured north, where I took up a teaching position at the University of California at Berkeley.

  The campuses of the University of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles reflect the same north/south differences, each adopting the flavor of its surrounding area.  UCLA is a pulsing, can-do organization; UCB is much more constrained.  I was particularly well placed to make an apples-to-apples comparison between the two, for while I was chairman of UCB's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences in the early 1980s, I was recruited to be dean of UCLA's School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS).  Which campus did I prefer?  Read on.

  An initial experience at UCLA quickly drove home its difference from UCB.  As the 1983 holiday season approached, my first at UCLA, I decided to give a party to introduce myself to several of SEAS' constituencies—faculty, staff, alumni, donors, industrial friends, etc.  At UCB, I knew that an expenditure for such an event would be limited to a relatively small maximum amount per person, so I asked my Associate Dean how much I could spend.  He was puzzled.  What did I mean?  Apparently there was no cap at UCLA other than what reason might dictate.  (I believe that the UCLA Foundation could be counted on to subsidize such events beyond whatever University-wide constraints may have existed, on the assumption that they helped draw in donations.)

  My wife Helen asked the Chancellor's wife to suggest a caterer; when contacted, he said that as a ***special introductory offer*** to SEAS he would serve hors d'oeuvres and wine with a wait-staff for only $25 per person, but I would have to buy the wine separately.  I blanched (remember that this was almost 30 years ago) and quickly went back to the Associate Dean for a sanity check.  "No problem," he said.  "That's normal around here."  So I decided to go for broke.  I brought in roulette, blackjack and craps tables and their croupiers, and gave everyone scrip to gamble with, offering prizes to those ending up with the most scrip.  I invited about 500 people.  I strove for the sheer LA razzle-dazzle I saw all around me, and people loved it.  I was exhilarated by the splash it made.

  The party cost about $20,000, probably more than ten times what I had spent on entertainment during my entire three years as chairman at UCB.  (In the University's current straitened circumstances, I doubt if anyone could get away with that amount now, even at UCLA.)  More telling, I can attribute some two to three million dollars of contributions to SEAS over the next year or two directly to contacts, relationships and the "go for it!" image I created at that party.  Not a bad return on investment!  Would that money have flowed in anyway?  I believe not, for annual contributions to SEAS had traditionally been very much smaller.  I was learning a Los Angeles truism, that money begets money.

  Other activities at UCLA had the same can-do attitude.  When I had an idea that needed funding, I had almost immediate access to the Chancellor.  If he liked it, he would turn to one of his vice-chancellors and say, "Let's find the money and get this done!" and we would be off and running.  In contrast, I'd found the usual response to a novel idea at UCB, after working it through a deep hierarchy, was a list of reasons why it couldn't or shouldn't be done.

  Nothing is perfect, though—there's always a flip side.  In this case, I felt that UCLA's procedure for appointment and advancement of faculty members was deficient.  At the time, and maybe even now, initial appointments to the assistant professorship and biennial in-rank step increases were approved by deans.  Fuller evaluations by a committee made up of faculty members drawn from the campus at large were widely spaced—the first when a candidate was up for tenure, as much as eight years after hiring, and later ones only for promotions between ranks.  Contrarily, at UCB every appointment, in-rank step-increase and promotion case is stringently reviewed by a campus committee, which thereby imposes a tough uniformity of hurdles that must be jumped by all faculty members campuswide.  In my view, UCLA's largely localized screening procedure led to a weaker faculty, which had to affect the quality of teaching and research and the recruiting of the best students.

  Another downside was personal: the impossibility of buying a house near UCLA as good as the one Helen and I owned near UCB.  Such a house would cost three times what the Berkeley house was worth, at a time when prime rates were over 10%.  Even the can-do UCLA couldn't cut that problem down to size, so my fantasy stay in La-La Land ended after three years, when I decided to return to Berkeley and UCB.

  In my memory's coloring book, I have painted UCLA with magenta, chartreuse and cyan, and used muted shades of gray with hints of pastel for UCB.  Perhaps the vastly different approaches those colorings represent are what makes the University of California system as a whole such a variegated power house.   After all, what can be more impressive than the fact that five of the nine UC general campuses are ranked among the top ten public universities in the U.S., with UCB and UCLA ranked first and second, respectively? 

  I count myself very fortunate to have had the opportunity of working at both campuses.  Did I have a preference?  Well, I loved both the razzmatazz of being an administrator at UCLA and the cloistered serenity of my teaching and research days at UCB.  All said and done, it was a draw—my times at the two campuses were equally great chapters in a cherished academic career.

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Odd Woman Out

  I sing now my praises of Sheila Bair.  A strange icon indeed, this former chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.  Why an essay of adulation about a bureaucrat, not about some great artist or scientist?  Not only because of her accomplishments, but also because she's just the type of woman I looked forward to in a previous posting, one who has reached the top of the ladder while bearing with her a distinctly feminine worldview. As she herself points out, her thinking includes substantially more risk aversion than men have, a trait we sorely need in our still hyper-charged financial sector.  That risk aversion served the nation well as the testosterone-fueled Great Recession rampaged over us.

  My appreciation of Bair comes in part from watching interviews of her on TV, but most especially from reading her new book, Bull by the Horns: Fighting to Save Main Street from Wall Street and Wall Street from Itself.  It tells a fascinating story of our financial system and its regulatory apparatus during the Recession, from the perspective of a government insider.  Although Bair was just one protagonist in that sad tale, and others may tell a different story, her narrative rings quite true to me.  It is clearly, passionately and consistently written, and jibes completely with what I gleaned from the news during the crisis and to this date.

  Regulation of banks in the U.S. is extraordinarily complicated, for it is shared first between state and national governments and is splintered further within the federal bureaucracy among the FDIC; the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC); the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS), now merged with OCC; the Federal Reserve System (FRS or Fed); and the Secretary of the Treasury, to whom OCC and OTS report.  The FDIC, in addition to directly regulating about 5000 state-chartered banks, insures the deposits in all banks, even those regulated by another agency; and it can step in as backup regulator of any bank it believes to be at risk.  Such a complex and interdependent regulatory system inevitably leads to interagency battles.

  Bair gives a behind-the-scenes look at such battles as government officials struggled to cope with the Recession and make plans to prevent its recurrence.  She was usually the odd woman out, indeed the only woman at all, having to fight for principles that she thought were being ignored in the heat and fog of events by her fellow regulators as well as by members of Congress and White House officials.

  When Bair started her five-year term in 2006, the country's decade-long flirtation with banking deregulation had reached its peak.  The emphasis had become self-regulation by the industry—so-called "letting the market work."  The FDIC had been downsized by over 60% and its audits of banks it regulated were derisively called "drive-by exams" by the remaining staff.  Premiums charged for FDIC insurance had been eliminated for more than 90% of banks and were not risk-based for the rest.  Mandatory capital reserves held by banks against the possibility of loan losses had been reduced to dangerously low levels, and further reductions were being proposed in accordance with a new international standard called Basel II.

  Bair was appalled by what she found, greatly fearing its effects should there be a systemic crisis.  Her initial battles with the OCC, OTS, Treasury and FRS were over such issues as resuming and risk-adjusting premium payments from all banks, and increasing and risk-adjusting capital-reserve requirements.  Her opponents pretty much followed the financial industry's party line: each dollar paid to the FDIC in insurance premiums or set aside as capital reserve was a dollar not available for lending, and therefore was bad for the economy.  Contrarily, Bair insisted that those dollars were essential to prepare for and ameliorate crises—it was, after all, her agency alone that would be on the hook to protect the public's deposits in banks should a crisis erupt.  She had already begun to see the sub-prime crisis reflected in FDIC audits in 2006-07, and was among the first to issue warnings to her fellow regulators, which were largely dismissed out of hand.  Due to her initial efforts, though, the FDIC's Deposit Insurance Fund was able to withstand the wave of bank failures that came.

  When the full-blown crisis did come in 2008, new battles erupted, with much the same battle lines: the OCC, OTS, Treasury and to some extent the Fed on one side, chiefly focused on bailing out Wall Street institutions; the FDIC on the other, usually more focused on Main Street.  Bair contended with her fellow regulators and others on many objectives she thought essential, such as limiting the ongoing bailouts; properly penalizing failed institutions, their creditors and their management for aberrant behavior; rebalancing the regulatory system to protect the economy and the taxpayer; and curbing institutions that are "too big to fail."  In arguing those issues, she consistently applied a coherent set of core principles she deems necessary for a sound banking system. They represent a delicate equilibrium between firm regulation and market incentives. 

  Many of Bair's principles found their way through her efforts into the 2010 Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which the financial industry is now mightily trying to dilute.  If you were to read just one chapter of her book, it should be Chapter 26, in which she explains her principles and gives recommendations for how they can be further implemented.  In effect, the chapter is a charter statement for the subtitle of her book: Fighting to Save Main Street from Wall Street and Wall Street from Itself.

  Bair won some and lost some.  She had to deal with many personalities during her battles, some easy for her to work with, some not.  But her bête noire was Secretary of Treasury Timothy Geithner, who fought her fiercely on virtually every issue they discussed.  She still feels that Geithner epitomizes the bias toward Wall Street and away from Main Street that led to the crisis, and then handled the crisis and fought needed reforms with the same bias.  The net result, she asserts, has been to magnify "too big to fail" by enlarging already mammoth banks and deepening the unspoken assumption that, despite the dictates of Dodd-Frank, government bailouts will be again be available in the next crisis, thus encouraging continued overly risky behavior.

  Bair can be very proud of her administration of FDIC during her very turbulent term.  She adhered to her principles as much as was within her power, given the interference she faced from other agencies.  A stunning 417 banks failed from 2006-11 because of the Recession, almost 25 times as many as in the previous five years.  Altogether, they had $680 billion of assets, about half in banks regulated by the singularly inept OTS, which often blindsided FDIC by rating its banks as much more solvent than they actually were. 

  No matter which agency was their regulator, however, all failed banks smoothly passed through the FDIC's resolution process, i.e., were liquidated or sold to stronger institutions, without a single day's interruption in the availability of insured deposits.  Although resolution of the failures cost the FDIC's Deposit Insurance Fund about $80 billion, not a cent of that was taxpayer money—it all came from the premiums collected from banks, which would not have been possible had Bair not won her fight to restore and increase them.  Shareholders, creditors and management were all forced to take losses that were consonant with their responsibility for the failures. 

  That excellent record should be compared with the many hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars committed by the Treasury and the Fed to save the very "too big to fail" financial institutions that were principally responsible for the crisis—without exacting appropriate losses from their creditors and management.  At this writing there is still a net loss to the taxpayer, which may never be completely eliminated.

  So I must conclude with a hearty, "Well done, Sheila Bair!  We need more like you!"  As a final stanza of my song of praise to her, here's a measure of my admiration: Although she is a lifelong Republican, and I a lifelong Democrat, I would gladly vote for her were she to run for elective office.  It would possibly be the first vote I would cast for a Republican.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

The Anticlan

  I wrote last week about the life-long damage that discrimination inflicts, a result of the clannish, "us vs. them" behavior that is all too normal in human affairs.  Today, I write about the antithesis of such clannishness, a "we, all of us" mindset that is embodied in a group I know, which I'll call The Anticlan.  (I won't identify it for fear of embarrassing its core members.  Many readers will recognize it anyway.)  The Anticlan is surely not unique.  It is no doubt like other outreaching groups that you may know, but let me describe its operation so I can make my final point.

   A traditional clan is exclusionary, membership obtained on a limited basis, usually through birth or marriage.  It views other clans with suspicion, often hatred.  Contrarily, The Anticlan is obsessively inclusive.   It is as if it were a giant planet like Jupiter, sweeping into itself everyone who comes near.  Originally comprising a nuclear family that still forms its core, The Anticlan has grown for many years as others came into its gravitational field.

  I was drawn into orbit decades ago through a business colleague, himself a member by marriage.  Others were captured by living on the same block, having gone to school or done business with other members, or chance meetings.  Each new member in turn attracts additional members in the same manner.  This growth is not at all by active planning or proselytizing, merely by happenstance and an unspoken credo of inclusion.

  An initial introduction is followed by a warm embrace: one is asked to various Anticlan events.  The invitations are sometimes quirky.  In my case, my business colleague would call up and say, "Sunday's dinner is at 6 pm."  Just that.  I would scramble to my calendar to see if I had forgotten something, but I hadn't.  Yet such invitations were so charming and sincere in their idiosyncrasy that my wife Helen and I would attend if we could.  Others in the extended Anticlan would be there too, likely invited in the same abridged manner.

  Often the invitations are to more significant events than dinner—weddings, graduations, even vacations.  On one occasion, Helen and I were informed that The Anticlan had rented a compound in Hawaii, at which a milestone birthday of The Anticlan's matriarch would be celebrated.  We were told by my colleague that seats had already been reserved for us on such and such flights; we only had to make the final arrangements.  We were again enchanted by the warm but eccentric inclusiveness, and found ourselves going. 

  While in Hawaii, a signal event occurred.  One of the matriarch's sons, as a surprise to his parents, flew his new fiancée there from Russia, where he had met her, in order to introduce her to them—and, incidentally, to the assembled horde from The Anticlan.  Poor woman, I thought.  She could barely speak English at the time; Hawaii and The Anticlan must have seemed like another planet!  Yet that planet was the self-same Jupiter I have mentioned, and she too was captured by its strong gravitational pull.  When she married into The Anticlan, her parents, who lived in Moscow, were also swept into its orbit, embraced by it on their own trips to the U.S. 

  On another occasion, a year or two after Helen died, I almost magically found myself on a sailing trip in the Caribbean—ten glorious days of hopping between islands, sharing nautical tasks with other Anticlan members I'd not previously met.  The boat charter, every detail, had already been arranged, and I was simply told when and at what gate to appear at the airport.  I, a loner (especially after Helen's death), had still after all those years not quite gotten used to the zaniness of such arrangements, but was again quite literally captivated.

  To this day, I have thus been drawn out of my shell.  Recently, I attended the 90th birthday of The Anticlan's patriarch.  About sixty people from all over the country were there to pay him honor.  Although I knew most of the attendees from previous Anticlan occasions, there were again new faces.  One couple had not long before moved from Australia to settle in the Bay Area.  They had been introduced to the core family by another son, who—although himself living on the East Coast—had thought that the new arrivals would need a network of friends as they adjusted to California.  The woman of the couple told me that they had been adopted by The Anticlan, which made their transition so much easier.  I had heard the same story many times before by migrants to the Bay Area from the world over.

  Why do I tell this collection of anecdotes?  Because I think they well illustrate how The Anticlan's infectious inclusiveness runs counter to the normal human trait of clannishness—a trait I believe must be a genetic legacy of the cave man's need for self-defense, 50,000 or more years ago.  Although recent millennia of human history have led us to ever more inclusiveness, our genes still often reflexively tell us to flock with birds of our own feather, a conduct that even now splinters the world.  The Anticlan flocks with birds of many feathers in a lovely symbiosis.

  That leads me to my point.  I cannot help wondering:  Is this Facebook generation, with its obsessive "friending," the germ of a new norm of inclusiveness, an Anticlan on steroids?  Will the age of digital hyperconnectivity be a turning point in human social organization?

  In a previous posting, Neurons and the Internet, I quoted Jesuit priest and media scholar John Culkin as saying, "We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us."  That was in a pessimistic context: the possible deleterious neuronal effects of multitasking.  More optimistically, in the present context, could social networking be rewiring our neuronal networks toward a more inclusive nature?   Could even a genetic adaptation start to take place?

   Of course, I am wildly speculating here.  A connection between multitasking and neuronal rewiring in individuals at least has some basis in observational data, as discussed in the Neurons and the Internet posting.  I'm unaware of any scientifically established connection between social networking and reduced clannishness, not even a hypothesized neuronal rewiring of individuals, much less a predicted evolution of the species.  However, if there were a beneficent evolutionary force at work over generations—if belonging to extensive social networks confers a competitive advantage over belonging to just a narrow clan—one can only hope that its fulfillment won't take another 50,000 years!

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Masquerading

  From as young an age as I can remember, I heard a constant refrain from my family: "Keep a low profile as a Jew."  It derived from countless sources: the long history of persecution of Jews; my own grandparents' experiences with pogroms in the old country; the madness that was overwhelming Germany as the Nazis took power; the anti-Semitism still endemic in 1930s America, represented by the hateful weekly radio broadcasts by Father Coughlin—the list was lengthy and persuasive.  It was dunned into me that there was my inside Jewish world, and the outside WASP world.  I might be tolerated in the latter, but no good could come of blaring my identity; and if I did reveal it, I should do so in a way that brought no discredit to Jews in general.

  Never having personally experienced anti-Semitism, I was loath to think that America at large could be as discriminatory as the warning implied.  By the time I was 17, I could point out to my family that, despite being told that many colleges limited their Jewish enrollments, I had been accepted at all to which I applied.  As only a youngster can do in the face of advice proffered by elders, I snidely repeated the wisecrack that anti-Semitism is to Jews what weather is to everyone else, a constant topic of conversation. 

  None the less, I found that the inoculation had taken hold.  Whenever it seemed appropriate, I would camouflage my Jewishness.  Thus, in my first independent venture into the outside world, when I searched for a job to occupy the eight months between graduating from high school in January 1947 and going to college in the Fall, I reflexively took advantage of my Americanized surname to masquerade, taking care that I wasn't seen as a Jew.  I landed a job as an office boy at Newmont Mining Corporation on Wall Street, then and now an international giant in the mining industry.  And in truth I was soon pretty sure that I was the only Jew there, unless someone else was masquerading too.

  My responsibilities were the usual for a gofer: announcing visitors to their appointments in the various offices, going to buy take-out lunches for the executives, doing whatever odds and ends needed doing.  That didn't mean there were no exciting chores for a 17-year-old.  I also cleared cargos through the splendid old Customs House on the Battery, ran errands to other Wall Street firms and to the Stock Exchange, and so forth—experiences that taught me much about the financial district in lower Manhattan.

  Despite my drilled-in sensitivity to the specter of anti-Semitism, I still wasn't prepared for an incident a few months into the job, when I went to the desk of the employment officer to announce the arrival of an applicant for a secretarial job.  She had a distinctly Jewish surname, so Mr. Schmid asked me if she looked Jewish.  I was shocked—my first personal encounter with overt anti-Semitism, mild as it was.

  The French have a splendid expression, "l'esprit d'escalier"—the spirit of the stairway—to account for those occasions when we think of just the right thing to say, but only when it's too late, when we're already on the stairway leaving the occasion.  I am still proud today that my wits were about me on the occasion of Mr. Schmid's question and not later.  Recovering quickly from my shock, I put on my most innocent look and said, "Mr. Schmid, I'm not sure what a Jew is supposed to look like."  Of course, the poor woman didn't get the job; looks or not, her surname alone was enough to sink her.

  Shamefully, after that incident I felt fortunate that I could continue masquerading—neither my skin color nor my surname would give me away.  I was certain now that my mask was why I had been able to get the job; and perhaps, I thought, it was also why I had been able to get into the colleges to which I applied.  It was only then that I began to realize that many others didn't have even that shabby opportunity to bury their heritage.  On the positive side, the incident stoked the liberal politics that I had also inherited from my family, for I became more convinced than ever that America needed to change.

  That fleeting encounter with Mr. Schmid, to this day my only personal experience with unconcealed anti-Semitism, was a booster shot for the inoculation by my family.  "Keep a low profile as a Jew" set itself deeper into my psyche.  When I had children, I found myself giving them the same advice.

  So here I am at 82, realizing with astonishment that in this very blog I have sometimes wantonly raised that profile, literally broadcasting my identity to the world.  Even in this more enlightened age, it is a change of behavior that has given me a profound sense of unease. 

  Thus are the wounds of our ancestors perpetuated in ourselves.

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Paean to the Brits

  I have been in love with the Brits since I was ten years old.  That was 1940, the year of the Battle of Britain.  I was just old enough to understand what was going on and what was at stake. 

  By mid-year, the Nazi war machine had overrun almost all of western and central Europe.  The British Expeditionary Force, sent to help defend France, had been shattered—some 68,000 of its troops killed, wounded or captured and virtually all of its equipment abandoned.  Just before France fell in June, the BEF's remnants had barely escaped from Dunkirk, its evacuation aided by the miraculous armada of small boats. Every sea-worthy vessel from the coast of England, mostly manned by civilians, sailed under fire across the Channel to aid in the rescue of a third of a million BEF and allied soldiers.

  Britain now stood alone against Germany, Hitler fully expecting it to sue for a negotiated peace.  Winston Churchill, who had recently been appointed prime minister, had a fiery answer: "We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender."  Hitler made plans to invade.

  The Battle of Britain turned out to be totally an air battle.  Given the strength of the British navy, Hitler knew that he could not mount a cross-Channel invasion without complete control of the air.  He sent the Luftwaffe to demolish the Royal Air Force (which had already lost almost 1000 aircraft and 1500 crew members in France) and its airfields, as well as other military installations and harbors, and to bomb cities in order to destroy civilian morale. 

  At the start of the Battle, the only thing in the Luftwaffe's way beside anti-aircraft gun batteries were fewer than 1000 RAF fighter planes and a few more pilots.  With the help of their newly invented radar, which detected incoming aircraft, the British were able to send fighters on sorties pretty much around the clock in all weather to intercept the Luftwaffe bombers over the Channel.  Planes that returned operational were often refueled as soon as they landed, manned by a fresh pilot, and returned to battle.  Casualties were severe—a newly trained pilot had little chance of surviving more than five sorties.

  But by mid-September the RAF had won the Battle, destroying perhaps half of the incoming Luftwaffe force and forfending an invasion of the island.  Hitler decided to plan for an invasion of the Soviet Union instead. That was when Churchill said, "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few." 

  How could a boy of ten not fall in love with such bravery?

  The first personal liaison of my love affair was twelve years later, in 1952, just after obtaining my Master's degree.  I had gotten a summer job as a laboratory assistant at Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company in Chelmsford, just northeast of London.  I was a bit worried, because I had repeatedly been told that I would find the Brits cold and removed.  Nothing could have been further from the truth; I found them uniformly warm and welcoming to a youngster abroad for the first time.

  My pay was £7 10s 6d per week in the old coinage (20 shillings to the pound, 12 pence to the shilling), worth about $21 at the time—more than adequate to live on.  Half of that went to my boarding house—a room plus two meals a day.  My room had an "electric fire" in the fireplace, and there was a small water heater over the bathtub in the communal bathroom.  Both were operated by inserting a penny at a time—a copper coin only a bit smaller than a U.S. half dollar and worth about 1¢.  I had to remember to keep several pence around at all times if I wanted to stay warm and clean!

  I immediately bought a used bicycle so that I could get around.  That soon brought me into contact with my first British police constable, who stopped me because the bicycle's dynamo wasn't working, so I was riding at dusk without a light.  When I explained that I had just arrived from America and only that day bought the bike, he said, "Well, let's see what we can do about that."  He removed his helmet, neatly folded his jacket and laid it on the ground, rolled up his sleeves, and within a few minutes had repaired the dynamo.  He then sent me on my way with a "Welcome to England!" and a cautionary word about riding without a light.  A lad from New York City was unused to such an obliging police officer.

  The bike also quickly showed me what Churchill had meant by "we shall fight in the fields."  On my first week-end, I biked through the countryside toward the Channel (which is less than 20 miles from Chelmsford).  I was puzzled by the many concrete cylindrical structures I saw, which had narrow slits in them.  On inquiry, I was told they were "pillboxes."  With most young men in the army during the war, they were a local line of home defense.  If the Germans invaded, church bells would sound, and locals—mostly older men and women—would rush to them so they could shoot at invading Nazi Panzer divisions with their rifles!  No one was going take "this scepter'd isle ... this blessed plot, this earth, this realm" from the Brits. 

  On arriving in Britain, I had been given a ration book—pretty much everything was still rationed in 1952, seven years after the war.  The weekly meat ration, for example, was whatever 21 pence could buy, perhaps six ounces of steak or a pound of sausage.  I had to turn over the food rations to my boarding house, but could keep the special ration for sweets given to foreigners (I don't know why)—an outlandish two pounds (weight) per month.  I luckily don't have a sweet tooth, so I used my first month's ration on two pounds of chocolates to bring to my boss' home when I was invited to dinner there.  I'm so glad I did, because my hosts had obviously spent the whole family's meat ration for a week or two on fine lamb chops.  One of their children could not refrain from piping up, "Oh Mum! This is so nice!"  And the children couldn't keep their hands off the chocolates I had brought, as if they had never seen so much candy at one time. Things were still that pinched so many years after the war.

  London, which I visited several times, was still desolated from the Blitz—the rubble was cleared away, but huge swaths of empty lots were all around, the results of five years of air raids.  (On one of the worst nights alone, 29/30 December 1940, more than 24,000 high-explosive bombs and 100,000 incendiary bombs were dropped on London.)  I was in a state of shock at my first sight of the destruction of warfare—and that was years afterwards, not in the midst of the actual killings and fires.  Many medieval and Renaissance masterpieces were gone. Fortunately, because Churchill had ordered that Christopher Wren's magnum opus of St. Paul's Cathedral be saved at all costs, it sustained only minor damage, but much of the area around it was still leveled in 1952.  The Brits went about their business as if nothing had happened.  Perhaps they were not cold and removed, but they certainly had their well-known stiff upper lips.

  My ardor for the Brits flared during that summer.  In the intervening six decades until now, I have visited that "scepter'd isle" perhaps a score of times.  I remain very much in love with it and its occupants.