Barry Clemson

Barry Clemson Who I am and how I got that way

Early Years

I had a passion for climbing on things from a very early age. I don’t remember this, but Mother tells me that at age four I climbed the medium-sized tree in the backyard … and went so high that the branches would not support an adult. While the adults were rather frantically discussing how to rescue me, I climbed down. Over the next several years, I climbed everything I could find. One of my earliest memories is falling, hitting a limb on the way down and ending up scraped and bleeding from waist to armpit. I cried all the way home because it hurt! Mother told me I had at least fifty stitches in my head, mostly from falling out of trees, before I started school. Eventually I learned to climb without falling.

The summer I turned seven we moved from Pennsylvania Dutch country (Lancaster, Pennsylvania) to Anchor Point, Alaska. I was almost seven, Curtis was six, Richard four and Pamela an infant just beginning to walk. Mother and we children arrived at our homestead via a bush pilot who deposited us on the beach. The beach was utterly devoid of any signs of humans. The steep wooded bluff next to the beach seemed to rise forever but in reallity was a couple of hundred feet high.

The bush pilot, pointing at this wilderness of a bluff, said “The Clendenen cabin is right up there.”

“Uhhh … is there a path?”

“Sort of,” he said. “Go down there to that creek and you can follow it to the top of the bluff. You will see the cabin when you get to the top.”

“ Does Inez know we are coming?”

“No, but Larry said she will be glad to share the cabin with you.”

Inez Clendenen was in fact happy for the company and we shared the small cabin with her and her children … until the cabin burned down mid-summer and then we found ourselves in a tent while the men built a cabin.

I was in heaven. A gazillion trees to climb, a bluff that in places was vertical but had sand at the bottom to cushion our falls, and a beach with lots of driftwood for bonfires. At age six I was not yet expected to do much work so I had lots of time for exploring and adventuring. It was indeed heaven on earth.

The following year the road from Anchorage came right past our cabin and going to Homer, 20 miles away, was no longer an all-day adventure of driving on the beach (at low tide only) and fording two sizable rivers.

Getting to school continued to be walking two miles each way until the snow came and then dogsleds. When Raymond’s team and ours collided and the dogs fought, we had to deal with it or the dogs would kill each other. It was not easy to separate seven snarling, snapping dogs in one big pile. Each of those dogs weighed almost as much as we did and every time we pulled one out of the pile they lunged right back in as soon as we let go of them. I finally called a conference and we devised a strategy that let us stop the dog fight. Then there was the time Curtis and I met a large bull moose on the path … You quickly learned responsibility because there was no one to rescue you when you got into trouble.

We had about a dozen neighbors within walking distance. It was not uncommon to come home and find someone in your house, warming themselves by your wood stove and often eating some of your food. This was perfectly acceptable … everyone knew we were all in this together and all of us needed help from time to time. And if you are going to walk the 20 or so miles into Homer, you stopped to rest and eat when passing a cabin. We were a tribe and we took care of each other.

I got my first rifle, a single shot bolt action .22, at age 11. I was already a pretty good shot from countless hours with a Daisy BB gun. With the rifle, my forays into the woods now became hunting trips for rabbits, grouse, etc. I also continued playing, e.g., damming up small streams, cutting trails to favorite locations, and one summer building a cabin (we lost interest before finishing it).

The family moved to State College Pennsylvania when I was 16 and I have been in towns and cities ever since. There is a part of me that, rather ridiculously, still thinks I am a mountain man.

College Days

Starting at age 14, I worked part-time. My paychecks always went directly to Mother to help with groceries because we were rather poor. I think the early experience of “we are all in this together” in the wilderness made me feel that giving Mother my paycheck was just the natural thing to do. This continued throughout high school and college.

My two years at State College High School were important mainly because I discovered I was pretty smart. Our school had a large contingent of university brats, but I ended up with more academic honors than all but one of them. These honors led me directly to a half-time job as a technician at Nuclide Corporation, a small company making mass spectrometers. This job put me in charge of the leak-testing department and had me working with welders and machinists, invaluable experience for a kid.

My Bachelor’s degree was an exercise in false starts and silly turns. I started as a Physics major but eventually realized I didn’t want to work as a physicist … and thought becoming a geophysicist might be more interesting … romantic notions of driving a sled dog team through the wilderness … ridiculous!

Interlude

Walamo, Mexico
1962 ?? salmon fishing boat xxx

It was about this time, three years into a bachelor’s degree in science, that I read a book on the military industrial complex and was thunderstruck with the realization that the United States was not perfect. I jumped into reading about the Vietnam War and decided that the US had no business being involved in what seemed to be a civil war between North Vietnam and South Vietnam. For several years I spent as much time as possible working to end the US involvement in Vietnam.

In early 1963 Chico Neblett, one of the original Freedom Singers with SNCC, gave a speech at Penn State and I discovered to my horror that Black folks were not allowed to vote in Mississippi. This was my first introduction to large scale racism and my reaction was “this is not tolerable, this can not be allowed!”.

A few months later I arrived in Biloxi, Mississippi as part of the Mississippi Freedom Summer. Four days earlier, three of our colleagues (Goodman, Schwermer, and Chaney) were murdered by the Klan so we were all apprehensive. My car was shot late that first night while we were all sleeping. I drove it all summer with a small hole in the intake manifold.

My summer turned into almost a year in Mississippi and ended in a jail in Montgomery Alabama. Along the way I met several folks who had decided they just weren’t going to give in to fear. Their attitude was “you might kill me, but you can’t stop me”. I learned from them that it is never acceptable to say “I had no choice”. One always has a choice, even with a gun to your head … and there are worse things than dying.

The entire time I was in Mississippi, my parents were doing fundraising to support our project. And the local State College radio and newspaper cooperated with lots of “Local boy in danger” stories. When I returned home, cashiers and strangers on the street recognized me. Years later, my parents told me about the death threats and frequent midnight phone calls they received from racists in the local area. As my sister Pamela said, “They don’t understand that threatening a Pennsylvania Dutchman only makes them more stubborn.”

Finished BA while doing protesting, Met Shelley, started my MA

During my Masters program, I was intrigued by a Stafford Beer article I only half understood. I ordered Stafford’s Brain of the Firm and read it one night on a long bus trip … the little spot of light was so small that I had to move the book back and forth sideways to read a line of text. The book fascinated me but I almost ruined my eyes that night.

It was about this time that I was awarded a fellowship that gave me a year to do whatever I wanted … I didn’t have any classes to attend and I had an adequate income without working for the first time in my life. I dove into systems theory and cybernetics. Ashby’s classic “Introduction to Cybernetics” had exercises at the end of each chapter. Half-way through the book I could no longer do the exercises. I started over, doing all the exercises again. This time I made it about three-quarters of the way before bogging down. I started over again, from the beginning, reading everything and working all the exercises. This time I made it all the way to the end … and that is why I have a pretty good grasp of the fundamentals of cybernetics. I read each of Stafford Beer’s books as they became available and was fortunate to become friends with Stafford.

Philadelphia Board of Education
What we need here is systems theory
Ecumenical Institute
My personal path went atheism, peace work, civil rights work, student campus activism and I was seeing the limits of this and ready to embrace a more spiritual path
Joe mathews

Student Activism xxx

My doctoral dissertation was a trial. I was fortunate in having an advisor who allowed me to go off into system theoretic wilderness, but it also meant I was in uncharted territory and none of my faculty committee members had the expertise to help me because I already knew more systems theory/cybernetics than any of them. I spent one entire summer grinding away without making any progress whatsoever. Every day was the same … I would start in my study, with blackboards and bulletin boards with bits and pieces of what I was trying to assemble. I would stare at this for some time, rearrange things, think some more … and finally after two or three hours of this completely fruitless agonizing, I would get my big dog and we would go for a long walk in the mountains. I no longer even remember what had me so stymied, but I clearly remember the frustration it engendered. Eventually I did something (not what I wanted to do, but something that I could do) and had a dissertation that was accepted.

Being part of a faculty dissertation committee was another shock. My new department at the University of Maryland required that each dissertation committee included a member from the statistics department. The aspiring doctoral student presents the problem he/she wants to investigate and then the committee helps determine the proper statistical methods for the study. In this case, one of my departmental colleagues and the statistician immediately went off into the statistical stratosphere … none of the rest of us had any clue what they were talking about and the poor student was terrified because he thought he was supposed to use the methods they were talking about. Since I had nothing better to do, I thought about the student’s proposed project for a minute, then banged on the table to get the two statistical show-offs to stop, and suggested a very elementary statistical technique for our student. Everybody was silent for about 30 seconds, then everyone agreed and the meeting ended.

I sat on another eleven dissertation committees before leaving that department and every one of them went just like this first one … in each case, after listening to the statistical show-offs for a bit, I suggested a very simple technique which was always accepted. In my own doctoral program, I never took the two advanced statistical course that were listed as requirements. My approach was to study statistics on my own … I was not at all interested in what those coursesnormally cover, i.e., a lot of proving theorems … I am happy to take Sir Ronald Fisher’s word for the theorems. I wanted to know what you can do with statistics and fortunately for me, my advisor allowed this unorthodox approach to learning statistics.

…. more to come later ....