A Little History
I first met the Wizard back in the early seventies, through a mutual friend.
My father operated a sheet metal fabrication shop in Artesia then, and I would help out now and then.
Dad would employ various drifters and other assorted guys as well, some good, most bad. Employment never lasted beyond a few weeks, and then the guy would move on to God knows where.
One of those hires, though, would change the way I looked at things forever. His name was Ed, and he was the one who introduced me to the Wizard.
Ed was this intense little guy in his 30s. He would rattle on about free energy devices, Tesla, and something called the Bourke engine. I was fascinated. I had never heard of any of this stuff. My young mind ate it up.
At about this same time Deadman came into the picture. Deadman was some aerospace industry veteran who died and left a bunch of interesting hardware behind. It fell into the hands of one of my dad's shop neighbors, who in turn asked if my dad and I would take it off his hands.
He brought over a small truckload of stuff to my dad's shop, and my dad, Ed and I sat for a couple of hours poring over boxes of vacuum tubes, aircraft parts, and other various bits of unidentifiable hi-tech gimcrackery.
Ed was beside himself. Spit flew from his mouth as he jabbered excitedly and pointed at the boxes of gear. "The Wizard would love this stuff! Especially THIS!"
He held up a 2' x 3' bakelite panel festooned with switches. I thought it looked cool too but of course I wondered who this "wizard" was. Ed could see it in my eyes. "Let's take this over and show him! You wanna meet him? He's got a lot of cool shit! And he knows everything!"
Well I was hooked in. We bade my dad farewell and climbed into Ed's VW bug and drove off to meet the Wizard.
It was quite a drive. The wizard lived in El Segundo, in a cramped little cracker box of the type mass-manufactured right after the war.
The Wizard answered our knock and greeted Ed warmly but squinted at me suspiciously. But he let us both in anyway. He looked like the pictures of Howard Hughes in his last days (the sketches were in all the papers back then)--middle-aged, skinny, but with a huge unruly shock of hair and unkempt beard.
He led us through a dimly lit maze of ceiling-high stacks of newspapers and boxes, back to his bedroom, which resembled something like Frankenstein's laboratory. There were electronic devices and control panels choking the small space, and the air was thick with ozone. But the picture that always stuck with me all these years was that of his home computer.
You heard it right. He had a home computer in the early seventies, before anyone else. Not only that, but he had a couple of monitors hooked up to the thing, and a graphical user interface there on the screens! He had a mouse, too, not like the ones we use today, more like a metal box with pushbuttons on it. He also had a lightpen, which he waved around like a wand, jabbing at the screens as he mumbled to Ed. No wonder he was called the Wizard.
When Ed unwrapped the bakelite switch-panel and presented it to the Wizard, the Wizard locked onto it with some intensity, but that quickly faded as he announced dismissively, "early computer input device. They were programmed by laboriously inputting numbers on these rotary switches. Don't need 'em! We use this now." He pointed to his keyboard. Ed, dejected, handed the switch-panel over to me.
Nevertheless, the Wizard spoke of all sorts of forbidden and esoteric knowledge that day. My small brain reeled with the revelations:
"They're deploying the TRB-3 now! They've gone to the moon and back in under ten minutes!"
"Reality is multi-dimensional! You and I and everybody else pass through multiple dimensions every day and don't even notice it!"
"Of course there is time travel! The government's had the capability for years!"
And that, my friends, was my first visit with the Wizard. I couldn't wait to visit again...
My father operated a sheet metal fabrication shop in Artesia then, and I would help out now and then.
Dad would employ various drifters and other assorted guys as well, some good, most bad. Employment never lasted beyond a few weeks, and then the guy would move on to God knows where.
One of those hires, though, would change the way I looked at things forever. His name was Ed, and he was the one who introduced me to the Wizard.
Ed was this intense little guy in his 30s. He would rattle on about free energy devices, Tesla, and something called the Bourke engine. I was fascinated. I had never heard of any of this stuff. My young mind ate it up.
At about this same time Deadman came into the picture. Deadman was some aerospace industry veteran who died and left a bunch of interesting hardware behind. It fell into the hands of one of my dad's shop neighbors, who in turn asked if my dad and I would take it off his hands.
He brought over a small truckload of stuff to my dad's shop, and my dad, Ed and I sat for a couple of hours poring over boxes of vacuum tubes, aircraft parts, and other various bits of unidentifiable hi-tech gimcrackery.
Ed was beside himself. Spit flew from his mouth as he jabbered excitedly and pointed at the boxes of gear. "The Wizard would love this stuff! Especially THIS!"
He held up a 2' x 3' bakelite panel festooned with switches. I thought it looked cool too but of course I wondered who this "wizard" was. Ed could see it in my eyes. "Let's take this over and show him! You wanna meet him? He's got a lot of cool shit! And he knows everything!"
Well I was hooked in. We bade my dad farewell and climbed into Ed's VW bug and drove off to meet the Wizard.
It was quite a drive. The wizard lived in El Segundo, in a cramped little cracker box of the type mass-manufactured right after the war.
The Wizard answered our knock and greeted Ed warmly but squinted at me suspiciously. But he let us both in anyway. He looked like the pictures of Howard Hughes in his last days (the sketches were in all the papers back then)--middle-aged, skinny, but with a huge unruly shock of hair and unkempt beard.
He led us through a dimly lit maze of ceiling-high stacks of newspapers and boxes, back to his bedroom, which resembled something like Frankenstein's laboratory. There were electronic devices and control panels choking the small space, and the air was thick with ozone. But the picture that always stuck with me all these years was that of his home computer.
You heard it right. He had a home computer in the early seventies, before anyone else. Not only that, but he had a couple of monitors hooked up to the thing, and a graphical user interface there on the screens! He had a mouse, too, not like the ones we use today, more like a metal box with pushbuttons on it. He also had a lightpen, which he waved around like a wand, jabbing at the screens as he mumbled to Ed. No wonder he was called the Wizard.
When Ed unwrapped the bakelite switch-panel and presented it to the Wizard, the Wizard locked onto it with some intensity, but that quickly faded as he announced dismissively, "early computer input device. They were programmed by laboriously inputting numbers on these rotary switches. Don't need 'em! We use this now." He pointed to his keyboard. Ed, dejected, handed the switch-panel over to me.
Nevertheless, the Wizard spoke of all sorts of forbidden and esoteric knowledge that day. My small brain reeled with the revelations:
"They're deploying the TRB-3 now! They've gone to the moon and back in under ten minutes!"
"Reality is multi-dimensional! You and I and everybody else pass through multiple dimensions every day and don't even notice it!"
"Of course there is time travel! The government's had the capability for years!"
And that, my friends, was my first visit with the Wizard. I couldn't wait to visit again...
posted by Meta Luna at 9:53 PM
0 Comments:
<< Home