No, George isn’t dead. For the second time since I created this website I’m attempting to publish something about a fellow alumni while they are still able to read it themselves. The first person that I wrote about here was Jess Dominguez. This I’m publishing this in exchange for the loan of a 1961 yearbook. I lucked out because George had already written a short autobiography because he had already written it for someone else.
I was lucky in another way too. Just a week ago I was telling the friend that lent me the yearbook that if I were going to start publishing articles about living people the one I would like to start with was George Sherman. After all he was the greatest Magician I have ever known. But that is before he left Trona for Stanford.
So now I’ll let George tell his own story:
“I didn’t date while I was in high school until my senior year when I asked Barbara Corrion, a junior at Trona High, to the Christmas Ball. That worked out well and we eventually had five children.
“Because I had good grades in high school, I was accepted into Stanford as a Physics major, and because American Potash and Chemical Co. gave me a scholarship when I graduated from THS in 1956, I could afford to go there. But, on arrival, I found myself in deep trouble. I failed most of the placement exams they gave, so I had to take Dumb-Bell English (in addition to regular English at the same time) and couldn’t take Calculus until I had repeated Algebra and Analytic Geometry. And, my initial grades on themes I wrote for English class and for exams in the math classes were F’s. The entire freshman class had to take a reading test, and I was told by my advisor that I got the lowest reading speed of the entire class.
“I panicked and studied about 15 hours a day while all of my friends in my dorm were partying big time. Over Christmas break, I talked to my high school advisor in Trona, Mr Davis. He looked up my IQ scores and told me that while my score was well above average, it was probably among the lowest of such scores for Stanford students. He said that I could survive there but that I would have to work much harder than the other students there in order to do it.
“Since I was no good at sports or with girls, I had thought that the only thing I had going for me was that I was smart, so it was quite a blow to find out that I wasn’t smart either. I just couldn’t afford to fail at college. I did practically nothing but study my freshman year, and survived with about a C average. I gradually improved in the later years and had a little time for fun. When Barbara graduated from Trona High School, she enrolled in San Jose State, (about 30 miles from Stanford). My parents gave me a used car, so I was able to drive down to San Jose to see Barb and her room mate Judy McKeen who was also from Trona.
“I also drove up to San Francisco to go to the Fillmore Auditorium occasionally when it was a Rhythm and Blues dance hall with 99% of the audience being black. I saw most of the big name R & B stars like Ray Charles, BB King, Bobbie Blue Bland, James Brown, Hank Ballard & the Midnighters, the Drifters, etc. and early black Rock & Rollers like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, etc. of the 50’s. Barb and I married during the summer after my junior year, and lived in a 27’ mobile home in a trailer park half way between Stanford and San Jose during my senior year. I graduated OK from Stanford with a BS in Physics in 1960, but my Grade Point Average wasn’t good enough to get into a grad school.
“I was in the Air Force ROTC at Stanford, so when I graduated in 1960, I entered the Air Force as a 2nd Lt. for a 3-yr tour as a meteorologist. I didn’t know any meteorology, but the Air Force sent me to UCLA in the Meteorology Dept. in civilian clothes for one full year (12 months) taking undergrad courses in Meteorology. Barb took classes at UCLA too while we were there and transferred the units to San Jose State, so she got a BA from San Jose State in Education and an Elementary Teaching Credential at the end of the year. After leaving UCLA, I forecast the weather for a Strategic Air Command Bomber Wing at Hunter AFB in Savannah, Georgia for the remaining 2 years of my tour.
“I had earned all A’s at UCLA so it brought up my undergraduate GPA, making it possible for me to get into Grad. School. So after I left the Air Force I returned to UCLA to obtain a MS in Physics in 1965, and then went to work in the research laboratory of Aerospace Corp. in El Segundo, CA in the Los Angles area doing research in Optics (The area of physics concerned with light) in a laser lab. While I was there there, I continued to take graduate classes at UCLA, but most of them were Meteorology courses with an emphasis in Atmospheric Optics.
“While working at Aerospace, an event happened that had a major impact on the rest of my career. A Vice President of the company visited a lab at the University of Michigan where they were using lasers to make holograms that produced perfect 3-d images, which make it possible to see the image of something hidden by a tree by moving your head to look around the tree.
“He was able to borrow one of their holograms and he asked the photography department to make a copy of it. The copy hologram looked just like the original one, but when a laser beam was shined on the copy, it didn’t produce any image at all. So, he brought the original and the copy holograms to the Optics Department to figure out what was wrong. None of us understood how holograms worked, so I read the scientific research papers from the Lab at the University of Michigan and eventually realized how they work and why the copy did not work. So, I then figured out how to make copies that would work. And, when the Photography Dept. followed my directions, the copies they made did produce good, 3-D images. So, I wrote up a research paper explaining how to copy holograms. But, in order to explain that, I had to develop the theory of holography in a way that had not been done before. I made use of a mathematical technique that hadn’t been used much in the field of optics known as the ‘angular spectrum of plain waves’ (AS of PW). This method has several significant advantages over the standard techniques.
“After my paper was published in the Journal of the Optical Society of America, I received a letter from Emil Wolf, the most important optical physicist in the US and one of only a few in the world. He said that he had felt for a while that my way was the best way to explain holography, and he had been planning to do it himself. He then congratulated me for beating him to it. When I showed his letter to my boss, he suggested that I continue to follow that line of work. So, I did and every time I published a paper on it, Wolf wrote me saying, “I was just behind you!”
“Eventually, Wolf told we that if I became his PhD student in the Physics Dept. at the University of Rochester (U of R) in Rochester, NY, I would have all of my PhD research already done in my published papers. When I told this to Sekera, the atmospheric optics professor at UCLA, he said, “Well, you have everything else for the PhD in atmospheric optics already done at UCLA. So see if Wolf is willing to be your Thesis Advisor for UCLA and if so, you will have everything done for a Ph.D. in Meteorology.” Wolf agreed, so I wound up getting that degree without having to do much additional work. That degree made it possible for me to become a university professor, so I joined the Faculty of the University of Rochester (where Wolf worked) in the Institute of Optics (also known as the Optics Dept.) I loved teaching my classes on Physical Optics. And, I loved the research I was doing on revising the basic physical optics theory to be based on the AS of PW. But, this was not the type of research that would be supported by the military. So, I didn’t write proposals and therefore did not get financial support for graduate students and therefore did not get tenure. I had to leave after being there for 7 years.
“After that, I worked at a number of aerospace-type companies. I wasn’t very good at it because the jobs were always for short term contracts that required learning a new field in a short time, and by the time I was getting good at it, we were on to something else. I had to work long hours to survive and, usually, when there was a lay off, I would be one of those who were laid off. I could always find another job because of Wolf’s recommendations and, often, those in charge of my new job were former students from the Institute of Optics who thought that I knew the most about optics but who were later disappointed by my lack of productivity.
“All of this moving was hard on Barbara and the kids, and gradually things started falling apart at home. Not long after we moved from Connecticut to Santa Barbara, Barbara and I separated in 1984 and divorced in 1987. I lived in a large, 3 bedroom apartment only a couple of blocks away from Barbara’s house and, since the kids were teenagers, they flowed freely back and forth between the two homes until they started college. Over the years, Barbara’s health gradually deteriorated and she passed away in 2001. Her ashes are buried in the Trona Cemetery.
“All 5 of our kids turned out well and all of them have completed college with graduate degrees, are married, and have given me a total of 10 wonderful grandchildren. We all get together,along with my sister with her husband and her two children and Barb’s sister Jenny Corrion Smith and her children, for a full week around July 4, every other year in North Carolina. It is a joyous time for all of us.
“In about 1991, I decided I had to stop working in the aerospace industry. Since my kids were grown and on their own, I bought a 22 foot motor-home and lived in it on the streets to save enough money in order to quit work and go back to school for a year to get a teaching credential at UC Santa Barbara with the intent to teach physics either in a high school or at a community college. After graduation in 1993, I continued to live on the streets in the motor-home in Santa Barbara and taught physics part-time at Santa Barbara City College and Ventura Community College.
“When my father died in 1994, my mother couldn’t live alone, so I moved in with her in Whittier in the LA area and taught Physics at Fullerton College (a community college) part-time for one year and then full-time for 19 years when I retired in 2015 at the age of 78. I loved teaching at that level and was rather successful at turning-on a number of formerly “mediocre” students to the joys of Physics. My greatest success was a student who BARELY passed high school. He got turned on in my classes and truly EXCELLED. Eventually, he earned a PhD in Electrical Engineering at MIT and was then awarded the Outstanding Engineering Student of the Year for the year he graduated by Boeing Aircraft Company, who gives the award to only one graduate in the country per year. They loved him because he had made a robotic bird that flies by flapping it’s wings, carrying its own computer, and making it’s own decisions as it flies without any directions from the ground. It’s great achievement was it figured out by trial and error how to land on a wire. And, the way it does it is the same as the way real birds do it, which is stalling out above the wire and then falling down onto the wire.
“While I was teaching at Santa Barbara City College, I met a lady named Dee who is 6 years younger than me and we have been a monogamous couple ever since (about 25 years). She lived (and still lives) in Santa Barbara, and after I moved to my Mother’s house in Whittier, we would take turns driving, or taking the train, to the other one’s location to be together each weekend. Now, that we are both retired, we live together and commute back and forth together, spending about a week at a time at each location.
“Over the last several years, Dee has been developing dementia and I am her full time care-giver. Her condition has now developed to the point where I can not leave her alone. She has two grown daughters, one of whom is a physician’s assistant and the other is an RN, who are a great help to us. They are always willing to help me with advice and we make major decisions together. They come from Chicago and Santa Cruz to visit us about every 3 months or so to check on us and help us out.
“Dee and I are still very much in love and are truly enjoying our time together. In fact, I have to say that, in spite of her illness, this is probably the happiest time of our lives.
From time to time as is needed George sends emails to his mailing list about events in Trona and about the status of alumni.
Just like magic George improved his skills with the girls.
David,
It’s cool that you remember my magic shows with pleasure. When I was in the 6th grade, Trona High had a big assembly program of music, dancing, comedy, etc. that they traveled to perform at the other schools which were in our football league. They got permission to take me out of my class in order to travel with them to do my magic show as part of the show. I can’t remember what schools I performed at, but there were several on different days and I was thrilled! I remember the announcer warning the students to hold on to their marbles and pocket watches during my performance as he was introducing my act.
About a month ago, I suddenly realized that the experience I gained by doing my magic shows as a kid, paid off big time in the physics classes I taught in the community colleges. For one thing, it taught me how to be a performer instead of a lecturer, droning on and on. It really helped me to make my physics classes interesting and entertaining. Of course, I didn’t do any magic tricks in my classes, but I specialized in doing demonstrations that would catch the students by surprise and make them wonder what in the hell was going on! Once I had their curiosity up, they really concentrated on trying to understand my physical explanations of why things behaved the way they did. But, I hadn’t thought about it before as being similar to doing a magic trick. The only difference is that there is no hidden trick. It’s just physics doing it’s thing.
George
